From Publishers Weekly
For readers willing to relax demands for credibility and logic, Queneau's funny, philosophical nonsense is addictive. Here, Queneau ( Zazie dans le metro ) has created a world, starting with its banalities: the cliches, the tired small talk, the outdated prejudices, the little points of pride. This world, Home Town, is settled in its ways under perpetually blue skies and under the guidance of Nabonidus, its proud mayor. But the mayor's children, all corrupted by influences from Foreign Town, turn against both their father and the traditional ways. To say any more about the plot is to imply that there really is one. Like all of Queneau's books, this is much about language, both dry experimentation (the entire book is a lipogram--there are no X s) and full of neologisms and quirky style, which are meant simply to amuse ("Pierre went back down the three steps, paused by his father without turning his head, put his hat atop his head where it belonged, bent to pick up his suitcase and left"). But Saint Glinglin also has a distinctly mystical bent with its (often obscure) musings on life and fish, alienation and verdancy, sacrifice and eel-baskets. Described in brief, Queneau may seem a fearsome read, but in situ he is a gentle, playful guide. Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
The novels of Queneau (1903-76) were forerunners of le nouveau roman (the "new novel"), which rejected traditional methods of plotting and characterization and instead created fantastical fictional worlds replete with "new" languages. This novel suggests that fear binds all living beings together, but readers won't be able to dwell on that emotion, busy as they are trying to follow a bizarre plot replete with characters just this side of lunacy yet touchingly human. The liberal use of phonetic spelling ( existence translates to eksistence , aiguesistence, orgresistence , eggsistence , or algae sistence , if its fish) keeps us alert and amused. Queneau's riveting language provides an entree to complex existentialist meditations on the alienation of both fish and humans from nature and to brilliantly inventive discourses on insects. The plot is fantastical but interwoven with enough threads of reality to keep the reader turning pages. A fine rendition of one of Queneau's most important novels; essential for academic and large public libraries.- Olivia Opello, Onondaga Cty. P.L., Syracuse, N.Y.Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Kirkus Reviews
Queneau (The Last Days, etc.), who died in 1976, is best known as a precursor of postmodernism, and this inventive fiction, published in French in 1948, has a wonderful time playing with itself: it's as though Garc¡a M rquez and Beckett met in a dark alley and sat down drunk to collaborate. Ostensibly a series of improvisations on the theme of sons killing fathers, the book becomes both a great deal more and a great deal less than that. Queneau's home-grown myth focuses on the denizens of Home Town, specifically exile Pierre, who's absconded to Foreign Town to partake of ``legends and far-off hearsay.'' Soon enough the reader is plunged into a menagerie of eccentricities, including names (Zostril, Nostrademus, etc.), styles (parodies of anthropologists and any number of literary luminaries), and events: it never rains in Home Town, and there are no fish until it rains for a year, and the fish are everywhere, even in the taverns where people try to escape from the rain. After Pierre has his say, brother Paul's interior monologue concerns the countryside ``in all its horror,'' and sister Helene's autistic soliloquy is plaintive: ``I never cried. Did they cry, my companions?'' Queneau assiduously avoids the letter x until the last word of the novel (``excellence,'' if you must know): the author of Exercises in Style is nothing if not versed in word-games. At one point in this marvelous game, the Grand Prize is given for ``the finesse and subtleties of play.'' As Sallis points out in his introduction, both science and literature were ``games offering marvelous opportunities....'' As a result, endless plot and language mutations provide the sophisticated reader with a carnival ride of surprises and pleasures. -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.


Richard Eder, Los Angeles Times , 7/1/93
A fable whose extravagant plot is told with Queneau's odd-matter-of-factness, and whose exhilaration comes in the small upsets. . . . A beguiling wackiness laced with mysteries . . . St. Expery's Little Prince could be recounting Finnegans Wake.


Michael Dirda, Washington Post, 7/22/93
He is one of those writers, like his antic compeers G. K. Chesterton, Flann O'Brien and Lewis Carroll, who inspire newsletters, fan clubs, passionate exegeses and scholarly conferences. . . . An amalgam of the anthropological and the archetypal, leavened with sex, slapstick, wordplay and philosophical investigations. . . . This novel will certainly repay readerly efforts . . . but none is required to enjoy its bizarre humor.


Harvey Pekar, Austin Chronicle, 9/24/93
Consider what you get here: references to and satires of mythology and Freudian psychology. Varied narrative styles, including soliloquy, interior monologue, verse, and third person. A lot of laughs. Discussions of serious philosophical issues which are thought-provoking even when hilarious. All in one slim volume.


New Yorker, 7/2/93
Like all his fiction, it is so blissfully fizzy that the reader may scarcely notice its complexity.


Bill Marx, Boston Phoenix, 7/93
Raymond Queneau, that most erudite and light-hearted of experimental writers, plays his narrative games with vaudevillian humor as well as nihilistic abandon. . . . Queneau's vision in the wondrous Saint Glinglin, as in most of his fiction, is surrealism gone sane.


Stuart Whitwell, Booklist, 6/1/93
Sometimes hilarious and sometimes--as in its central story of sons driving their corrupt father to his death--as powerful as Greek tragedy. . . . Queneau's play with language begs for comparisons with Joyce, and the undercurrents of ancient and modern mythology (particularly those cooked up by Freud) are perfectly integrated. This, in short, is literature.


Stuart Whitwell, Booklist starred review June 1-15 93
"Sometimes hilarious and sometimesas in its central story of sons driving their corrupt father to his deathas powerful as Greek tragedy. . . . Queneau's play with language begs for comparisons with Joyce, and the undercurrents of ancient and modern mythology (particularly those cooked up by Freud) are perfectly integrated. This, in short, is literature."


New Yorker 8-2-93
"[Queneau's] inventive way with words is at its wildest here. Like all his fiction, it is so blissfully fizzy that the reader may scarcely notice its complexity."


Michael Dirda, Washington Post Book World 8-22-93
"An amalgam of the anthropological and the archetypal, leavened with sex, slapstick, wordplay and philosophical investigations. James Sallis's translation is deft and accurate, his English dotted with felicities."


Book Description
The first paperback edition of the last of Queneau's novels to be translated into English. Saint Glinglin is a tragicomic masterpiece, a novel that critic Vivian Mercier said "can be mentioned without incongruity in the company" of Mann's Magic Mountain and Joyce's Ulysses. "By turns strange, beautiful, ludicrous, and intellectually stimulating" (as Mercier goes on to say), Saint Glinglin retells the primal Freudian myth of sons killing the father in an array of styles ranging from direct narrative, soliloquy, and interior monologue to quasi-biblical verse. In this strange tale of a land where it never rains, where a bizarre festival is held every Saint Glinglin's Day, Queneau deploys fractured syntax, hidden structures, self-imposed constraints (no words with the letter x until the final word of the novel), playful allusions, and puns and neologisms to explore the most basic concepts of culture. In the process, Queneau satirizes anthropology, folklore, philosophy, and epistemology, all the while spinning a story as appealing as a fairy tale.


Language Notes
Text: English (translation)
Original Language: French


About the Author
Raymond Queneau is acknowledged as one of the most influential of modern French writers, having helped determine the shape of twentieth-century French literature from the surrealists to the New Novelists and Oulipo, a group of authors that includes Italo Calvino, Georges Perec, and Harry Mathews. As both novelist and critic, Queneau's work represents one of the greatest literary achievements of this century.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

The first paperback edition of the last of Queneau's novels to be translated into English. Saint Glinglin is a tragicomic masterpiece, a novel that critic Vivian Mercier said "can be mentioned without incongruity in the company" of Mann's Magic Mountain and Joyce's Ulysses. "By turns strange, beautiful, ludicrous, and intellectually stimulating" (as Mercier goes on to say), Saint Glinglin retells the primal Freudian myth of sons killing the father in an array of styles ranging from direct narrative, soliloquy, and interior monologue to quasi-biblical verse. In this strange tale of a land where it never rains, where a bizarre festival is held every Saint Glinglin's Day, Queneau deploys fractured syntax, hidden structures, self-imposed constraints (no words with the letter x until the final word of the novel), playful allusions, and puns and neologisms to explore the most basic concepts of culture. In the process, Queneau satirizes anthropology, folklore, philosophy, and epistemology, all the while spinning a story as appealing as a fairy tale.

FROM THE CRITICS

New Yorker

Like all his fiction, it is so blissfully fizzy that the reader may scarcely notice its complexity.New Yorker, 7/2/93

Washington Post

He is one of those writers, like his antic compeers G. K. Chesterton, Flann O'Brien and Lewis Carroll, who inspire newsletters, fan clubs, passionate exegeses and scholarly conferences. . . . An amalgam of the anthropological and the archetypal, leavened with sex, slapstick, wordplay and philosophical investigations. . . . This novel will certainly repay readerly efforts . . . but none is required to enjoy its bizarre humor.
Michael Dirda, Washington Post, 7/22/93

Los Angeles Times

A fable whose extravagant plot is told with Queneau's odd-matter-of-factness, and whose exhilaration comes in the small upsets. . . . A beguiling wackiness laced with mysteries . . . St. Experys Little Prince could be recounting Finnegans Wake.Richard Eder, Los Angeles Times, 7/1/93

Boston Phoenix

Raymond Queneau, that most erudite and light-hearted of experimental writers, plays his narrative games with vaudevillian humor as well as nihilistic abandon. . . . Queneau's vision in the wondrous Saint Glinglin, as in most of his fiction, is surrealism gone sane. Bill Marx, Boston Phoenix, 7/93

Austin Chronicle