Pierrot Mon Ami

Fülszöveg

Near the end of his quixotic story, Pierrot, Queneau's hero-jester-quester, speculates on his experience:" he saw clearly how all its constituent elements could have been combined into an adventure that might have been developed into a mystery, later to be solved like a problem in algebra in which there are as many equations as there are unknowns, and he saw how it had not turned out like that. He saw too the novel it could have made, a detective novel with a crime, a guilty party and a detective . and he saw the novel that it had become, a novel so shorn of artifice that it was quite impossible to know whether it contained a riddle to be solved or whether it did not, a novel in which everything might have been interlinked according to police plans but which was in fact totally depleted of all the pleasures provided by an entertainment." This "innocent" implies how his story, at almost every turn, undermines, upsets, and plays upon our expectations, leaving us with more... Tovább

Fülszöveg

Near the end of his quixotic story, Pierrot, Queneau's hero-jester-quester, speculates on his experience:" he saw clearly how all its constituent elements could have been combined into an adventure that might have been developed into a mystery, later to be solved like a problem in algebra in which there are as many equations as there are unknowns, and he saw how it had not turned out like that. He saw too the novel it could have made, a detective novel with a crime, a guilty party and a detective . and he saw the novel that it had become, a novel so shorn of artifice that it was quite impossible to know whether it contained a riddle to be solved or whether it did not, a novel in which everything might have been interlinked according to police plans but which was in fact totally depleted of all the pleasures provided by an entertainment." This "innocent" implies how his story, at almost every turn, undermines, upsets, and plays upon our expectations, leaving us with more questions than answers, and doing so in a gloriously skewed style.
And yet, we seem to have all of the necessary elements for a coming-of-age novel: Pierrot's initiation into a world filled with deceit, fraud, and manipulation. From his short-lived job at a Paris amusement park where he helps to raise the skirts of girls to the delight of an unruly audience, to his frustrated and unsuccessful love of Yvonne, to his failed assignment of caring for the tomb of Prince Luigi—who may have never existed! —Pierrot stumbles about, nearly immune to the effects of duplicity. And if we are to take seriously the novel's closing line, we might suspect that Pierrot has understood all along what kind of world he inhabits and that, better than any others, he accepts it in the only way possible: with laughter. Vissza