Recommendations
Books Like Le Chiendent by Raymond Queneau
Books for readers who loved the Cartesian comic metaphysics and Queneau's portrait of consciousness brought into being by being watched
Le Chiendent (1933) is Queneau's debut — structured around Descartes's Discourse on Method, it uses suburban Paris and a group of ordinary people to explore the question of what brings a consciousness into full existence; comic and philosophically serious simultaneously. These 8 books share its interest in consciousness and identity, its philosophical comedy, and its love of suburban realism.
- 1
Buy on AmazonZazie dans le métro
by Raymond Queneau
The most immediately pleasurable Queneau — the linguistic energy and comic timing that Le Chiendent develops in a longer philosophical form are here concentrated into ninety pages of pure comedy.
- 2
Buy on AmazonLes Fleurs bleues
by Raymond Queneau
The late masterpiece — the philosophical comedy about time and identity that Le Chiendent initiates reaches its fullest form in Les Fleurs bleues's alternating medieval and modern narratives.
- 3
Buy on AmazonNausea
by Jean-Paul Sartre
The other French philosophical novel of the 1930s — Roquentin's radical uncertainty about the existence of the world around him is the existentialist version of Étienne Marcel's uncertainty about his own existence; the two novels are companion documents of French philosophical fiction in the interwar period.
- 4
Buy on AmazonThe Unnamable
by Samuel Beckett
A consciousness that cannot locate itself or cease speaking — Beckett's late trilogy is the bleakest version of the same inquiry as Le Chiendent: what does it mean to be a consciousness without a stable identity?
- 5
Buy on AmazonUlysses
by James Joyce
The foundational influence — Queneau was reading Ulysses as he wrote Le Chiendent, and the linguistic energy, the suburban realism, the comic ambition, and the structural frame (Homer/Descartes) are all Joycean inheritances.
- 6
Buy on AmazonThe Third Policeman
by Flann O'Brien
The Irish metaphysical comedy — O'Brien's bizarre logic and his exploration of identity and existence share Le Chiendent's ability to make philosophical questions funny.
- 7Buy on Amazon
Nausea
by Jean-Paul Sartre
The direct contemporary — Sartre's Roquentin and Queneau's characters are both grappling with the contingency of existence; the two novels are the comic and tragic versions of the same question.
- 8
Buy on AmazonMurphy
by Samuel Beckett
Beckett's first novel — a man trying to withdraw into the inner world of his own mind, in the suburban outskirts of a city (London); shares Le Chiendent's combination of comic suburban realism with philosophical inquiry into the nature of consciousness.
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