Les Fleurs bleues Reading Order

Les Fleurs bleues (The Blue Flowers, 1965) by Raymond Queneau is perhaps the most purely pleasurable of his major novels — a book that manages to be simultaneously one of the funniest comic novels of the twentieth century and a genuinely sophisticated meditation on time, history, and dreams. The novel alternates between two narratives separated by several centuries: the Duc d'Auge, a medieval French nobleman who appears to have been present at many of the key moments of French history (the Crusades, the Hundred Years' War, the Wars of Religion), and Cidrolin, a contemporary Parisian who lives on a barge on the Seine and spends most of his time doing nothing. The relationship between these two characters — whether one is the dream of the other, whether they are the same person, whether their alternating narratives converge or remain parallel — is one of the novel's central pleasures and one of its most open questions. Both characters are magnificently drawn: the Duc d'Auge is one of the great comic grumblers of French literature, and Cidrolin is a man of magnificent inertia, defended against everything by his total indifference to the world's demands. The novel also contains a running joke about the graffiti that keeps appearing on Cidrolin's fence and his efforts to paint over it, which provides the subplot with a wonderful comic energy. Les Fleurs bleues was Queneau's own favourite among his novels.