Sunday of Life     by Raymond Queneau, Translated by Barbara Wright Original language: French Published by New Directions Publishing Corporation Pub. Date: 1977 Format: Hardcover, 180 pages Dimensions: (in inches): 0.88 x 8.24 x 5.68 ISBN: 0811206459 List Price: $5.95 Buy online from Amazon.com for $5.95 Published by Calder Pub. Date: 1976 Pub. Place: UK Format: 200 pages List Price: £6.95 Not available for ordering

Queneau was a real one-off; a very fluent writer and deeply interested, like a proper French intellectual should be, in politics, psycho-analysis, philosophy and everything profound and abstruse including the history of mathematics. He was also an inveterate ironist. Sunday of Life is one of his most polished efforts, an extended nudge at the absurdity of ordinary folk.


The book focuses on a young man, Valentin, who is selected by two sexually-frustrated older women as the ideal mate. One of them goes to the barracks to organise the whole affair with his C.O. and voilà our family tale begins.


There is a resemblance to the hilarious late-Victorian English book ‘Diary of a Nobody’ by George and Weedon Grossmith because this too is the straight-faced telling of the story of naive types living in a mentally simplified universe. The book lurches however from Grossmith to Goon Show, with the absurdity and the swearwords cranking up as this family and their friends try to live a proper petty-bourgeois lifestyle, according to their bible, the French women’s magazine ‘Marie-Claire’. A lifestyle that involves a very perfect meditation on boredom, as Valentin, who has become the proprietor of a rather quiet, if extremely respectable, shop tries to make his mind blank to watch time melt away, taking ‘clockwatching’ to new, quasi-ecstatic heights...


While he mocks the lower middle-class, the French State and the novel form itself Queneau also enjoys himself by coining new words, one particularly notable one translated by Barbara Wright with her usual felicity as ‘somnodribbling’. A chatty and charming book with an underlying hard edge of sardonic social awareness.

‘Three months later they were married... Afterwards, there was something that was indispensable but, well, there you are, it was already October: couldn’t possibly close the shop in the busy season. They discussed it at length... Had to face reality: in fact hordes of customers were throwing themselves on to the pearl buttons, the braid and the adhesive plaster: they weren’t so rich that they could afford to miss all this good business.

No, of course not, said Valentin. You see, then, said Julia. And yet, said Valentin, and yet, it’s obligatory, a honeymoon. In theory, said Julia, in theory, mnot saying it’s not. You see, then, said Valentin. Have to admit, said Julia, have to admit that a marriage without a honeymoon, that doesn’t exist. Yes, said Julia, yes but the busy season is the busy season, and there’s no changing the seasons. Maybe we could put the honeymoon off until our next holiday, suggested Valentin. And when will we take the holiday, then? Julia objected. And he had no answer to that.

They finished by adopting the only possible solution, the one and only, to wit that Valentin alone would go on the honeymoon alone. During which time Julia would continue to make the wheels of commerce turn and pile up the shekels.’ p43