Les Fleurs Bleues (Blue on Blue)

"Yes. Queneau is an extremely multiple-gifted, talented writer, poet and essayist, and also a mathematician. Les Fleurs Bleues – Blue on Blue in English – is in the witty comic novel tradition. None of the books I’ve chosen up to now could be called comic. This is comic – wonderfully so. It’s a double story of a guy in retirement, living on a barge on the Seine, and after lunch he always has a sip of pastis and drops off, and the moment he drops off he dreams he’s someone else. And that someone is a medieval nobleman from Normandy who contemplates the historical situation and goes and bashes up a few peasants and has a meal and a drop of essence of fennel and drops off to sleep… and dreams he is a man living on a barge on the Seine, etc. And it goes back and forth, back and forth, between the one dreaming he’s the other, etc, except the historical reference point of each of the dream sequences moves forwards by 176 years each jump – you have to work that out for yourself – and by the last chapter, of course, what we suppose is the dream character, the medieval baron, actually turns up in Paris in 1965 and meets the guy who’s dreaming him and they get thoroughly confused. And the barge pushes off into the Seine and disappears into a bank of extremely murky fog!"