Odile [Paperback]

Queneau does a brillant job of showing the absurdity and humor in everything that happens in Odile. From the beginning there's a laugh when Roland states that his fellow soldiers "are really good guys and all capable no doubt of making really good butchers". The bohemians are seen as ineffectual idiots more interested in preaching to their own circle of disciples than improving the common people. They're the same posers you see nowadays in cafes preaching to each other about the sad state of humanity but having no effect upon their fate. Roland sees all this but goes along with the different movements, at least superficially. At one point he visits a seance where the spirit of Lenin is summoned and as he walks out he comments how pathetic the spectacle was. Even Roland is guilty, spending 8-12 hours a day in his apartment working with mathematical problems. He has spent years in the belief that he is a latter day Isacc Newton or an Einstein who will discover the true nature of reality through mathematics and physics. He's also too proud to admit he's in love with Odile. It wouldn't be in keeping with his image if anyone knew he was in love. At the end of the book he has a vision of what he truly is and he snaps out of the childish games of his adulthood.

This novel is funny, and I mean that in the humorous sense. The characters are a little weak except for Roland but that's to be expected in an autobiographical work. The beginning and the end of the novel pack more punch than the middle. The crisis of identity is equal to The Stranger in some passages but here we have a happy ending. A realization of meaning. Or IS it a happy ending? Roland decides to live a "normal" life and dismisses any rebellion against society as a childish act of defiance and a losing battle. You have to be assimilated sooner or later.

Travy, returned from two years military service in a mostly clerical position, subsists in Paris on an allowance from a gay, ex-colonial uncle, conducting obscure mathematical research, lost in a fug of solipsism, passivity and a lack of self-esteem. He drifts in with a group of petty criminals, where he meets another bourgeois abscondee, Odile, and, with equal passivity, gets involved with the Infrapsychics, an eccentric group of intellectuals who hope to provoke revolution through liberating the unconscious and the irrational.

For such a small book, 'Odile' is many things: a damning account of French colonialism in North Africa - the opening scenes depicting the crushing of a local rebellion in Morocco are frightening precisely because of their un-Tolstoyan vagueness; a satire/critique/fond evocation of political and cultural life in 1920s Paris, all the groups, -isms, infighting, experiments, flirting with Communism - in particular the Surrealists, to whom Queneau was briefly affiliated (he married Andre Breton's sister), relentlessly lampooning their arbitrary games and theories, while admitting the creative debt he owes them; a love story, postponed by a hero who 'despises' bourgeois notions like 'love' and 'marriage'; and the bildungsroman of an artist who goes along with whatever comes his way, be it the army, the Infrapsychics, criminals, Communists etc., always unhappy, but never taking the active step thta might transform his, or reconcile him to, life.

Fans of Queneau's more linguistically playful works like 'Zazie' and 'Exercises of Style' might find 'Odile' disappointing. As a love story, the figure of Odile is too idealised and symbolic to be affecting; the satire on Surrealism and its cultural milieu is too laboured and obvious to be laugh-out-loud (although this might be a problem with the flat translation: Queneau needs someone as recklessly inventive as Barbara Wright to survive in English) - there is fun to be had in recognising the fictionalised Breton, Aragon, Eluard etc., and there is an Alice-like court hearing, in which the magistrate starts interrogating Travy about Fermat's last theorem and the 'excluded middle'; the narrative of maturity is blunted by the narrator's rather unsympathetic personality, even if his aesthetics of mathematics is frequently, to this ignoramous, enrapturing, and his struggle to record his memories, imperfectly exploring the landscape of his mind with as many black holes as open spaces, is very poignant.

'Odile' has been called 'gentle', but what is most immediately apparent is the sadness and emptiness behind the logorrheic comedy. Where 'Odile' succeeds is formally and philosophically. It lacks the set-pieces of 'Zazie', but there is the same dizzying, elliptical style, what Gilbert Adair calls Queneau's 'jump cuts', the same telescoping and contracting of narrative time and space, that can be disorienting and liberating.

The novel opens with a beautiful paragraph about the narrator's (re?)birth, at 21, walking down a muddy road skirting a North African town, the rain just stopped, the last clouds caught fleeing in a puddle. Straight ahead of him stands an Arab, possibly a nobleman, a philosopher or a poet, staring at something. What that something might be, for the narrator, the reader, the novelist, the book, is what 'Odile' movingly explores.