Customer Reviews (1)

An Occupation-era paean to cinema and dreams.
This book's French title actually translates as 'Far From Reuil' (a suburb of Paris), but both are appropriate.'Skin of Dreams' relates the adventures of Jacques L'Aumone, schoolboy; illegitimate son of a nobleman poet; cineaste; chemical engineer; theatre director; extra; unrequited lover; vagrant; saint; documentary filmmaker; tropical adventurer; world-famous film-star.

The novel sets up a division between the 'real' world of 1920s Reuil and the cinema-generated dreams of the young Jacques, who wishes himself acowboy, composer etc.Distinctions between the two soon vanish, with fantasy becoming reality, or reality merely seeming fantastic (the plot has the circularity, recurrence and metamorphosis of characters, situations and motifs, the speedy rush of incident of a dream, but refuses to declare itself as such).

This goes beyond the familiar blurring of reality and fantasy, and is part of the Surrealist project of unearthing the fluid, transformmative, fetishistic and strange inherent in the monolithc everyday, with its repressions of reality, family, gender, etc.

This was a pertinent desire in the Occupation during which the novel was written: the novel is also a very funny parody of the existentialism that was emerging as the era's credo (one of the characters suffers from a 'posh' form of asthma called 'ontalgia').

Like Godard's universe in a coffee cup, the novel's metaphysical reach encompasses lice and the stars.For all its linguistic and philosophical enquiry, however, it should not be forgotten that Queneau has, in miniature, a Proustian facility with the extended set-piece - Jacques becoming the cowboy he imitates on screen; Jacques trying to tantalise an elderly Humbert into selling a valuable medicine; Jacques' abandoned wife relating her history - and a cast of characters that, again like Proust, are as vivid and human as they are protean and elusive. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Queneau, Queneau...
Une fête foraine, l'Uni-Park, sur l'emplacement de ce qui deviendra plus tard le Jardin Zoophilique. Au beau milieu de ce décor foiredutrônesque, où l'Alpinic-Railway voisine avec l'inénarrable Palace de la Rigolade, un étrange tombeau gardé par l'irréductible Mouilleminche, qui refuse obstinément de vendre son terrain. Tel est le décor au milieu duquel navigue notre ami Pierrot, amateur de petits boulots et de jolies filles, et ses amis Petit-Pouce et Paradis. Il tombe amoureux de la belle Yvonne, la fille du patron, qui hélas aime Paradis et se fiche pas mal de ses bonnes manières. Pas facile tout ça, quand on n'a pas un rond en poche et seulement ses yeux pour pleurer. Qu'il est étrange le petit monde de Raymond Queneau, ses personnages mêlant candeur et moquerie, son langage où surgissent ici ou là des incongruités grammaticales, des mots qui n'existent même pas. Et pourtant, qu'il est vrai! A la lecture de "Pierrot mon ami" les fans de Daniel Pennac découvriront une filiation évidente, sans toutefois les trouvailles de langage qui font florès chez Boris Vian et autres membres du célèbre "Collège de Pataphysique". Raymond Queneau a fait école, et c'est tant mieux, pour la langue française, qui a bien besoin d'être "décrassée", et pour notre plaisir de lecteur. A déguster sans modération... ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

A metaphysical mystery tour between mathematics and peotry.
Queneau used an incredibly rigid, and for its time, innovative structure for the creation of this marvellous book. Each chapter is divided in 13 parts, and every entry and exit of a character is perfectly measured. The beauty is, that reading the book, one isn't even aware of the structure. The story, set in 1920's Paris, recounts the intwining lives of a musician, a beggar, a down at heel mid-wife, and an "ordinary man", who during the passage of the book, gradually devellops a certain cosistancy ... Read more