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Book Description
The Oulipo, or Ouvroir de Litterature Potentielle, was founded by Raymond Queneau and friends in 1960 to find out how abstract restrictions could be combined with imaginative writing (as in George Perec's celebrated novel without the letter e). This Compendium is the first comprehensive survey of the group in any language. It includes extensive selections from the work of Oulipians, analyses of their important works and descriptions of their methods. Further sections cover related groups working in the fields of art, detective fiction, comic strips and even cuisine.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Reaches parts of your brain the others just don't reach,
By
This review is from: Oulipo Compendium (Paperback)
A strange name for a strange and intriguing book.
Oulipo is a contraction of Ouvroir de Littérature potentielle, which roughly translates as `workshop of potential literature'. Oulipo is a group of French speaking mathematicians and writers who seek to create works using constrained writing techniques. One of its founders, Raymond Queneau is the author of Exercises in Style. The book is a compendium of different techniques and approaches which are described, often with illuminating examples. It gives a fascinating glimpse into a host of different ways of thinking and looking at the world. One of the most fascinating consequences of constraints is that, far from reducing ideas and opportunities, the introduction of constraints serves as the stimulus to new ideas. Just take a look at the spam arriving with your email to see the creative lengths that spammers will go to, to get past anti-spam software. Or the lengths that car owners in the UK will go to, to construct words from the very limited patterns of letters and digits allowed on a number plate The book opens with Queneau's `Hundred thousand million poems' Ten pages each of 14 strips of text, that can be combined to create this immense number of different poems. From there onwards the book is a treasure trove of ideas to change the way you see. My personal favourite is `The Skinhead Hamlet' by Richard Curtis which uses the technique of substituting a vocabulary drawn from a radically different environment, in this case `skinheads', and applying it to Shakespeare's play. The language is inevitably strong, but it had me crying with laughter. This is a book that will enliven parts of your brain that others simply cannot reach.
15 of 18 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Whole New World,
By The Marfalouth "YeMarfalouth" (Walish) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Oulipo Compendium (Paperback)
Fish. Well, that's what most people think of when they think of surreal literature, but this is more, much more, than that.
Until I discovered Georges Perec, and through him Oulipo, I was a happy consumer of mainstream literature. This book, though, has opened my eyes to the amount of literature that's out there that doesnt get the recognition it deserves. Buy it. Read it. Hell, steal it if you have to, its worth a few months in jail for a life-changing experience isnt it? More than surreal, more than literature, more than entertaining, more than mindfood, this compendium literally will open your eyes. Believe me, you will never look at the bookshelves in well known bookshops in the same way again. Incidentally I wouldnt really condone stealing it, at least not when its as cheap as it is on Amazon now. Go on, treat yourself. You owe it to yourself.
10 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A fascinating and compelling guide to Oulipo and like groups,
By A Customer
This review is from: Oulipo Compendium (Atlas Archive) (Paperback)
Probably the best way for an English Language reader to get a sense of what Oulipo does at its best--you get to see how much more than a stunt the whole endeavor is. It includes much hard-to-find material, including a translation (!) of Queneau's One-hundrerd-trillion sonnets, and some neat experiments in severe overdetermination. It also includes the wonderful Skinhead Hamlet, by Richard Curtis. (Oddly, the editors--Harry Mathews is one of the major members of the workshop--say they can't track him down, but he's the screenwriter for Four Weddings and a Funeral, so shouldn't be too hard to find.) Lot's of interesting material on Georges Perec, and also on an American writer who wrote a novel in which no word is used more than once--a kind of hyper-Flaubertian enterprise.
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