Chiendent, Le (1933). Queneau's first novel, which he claimed was the result of an attempt to translate into modern demotic French Descartes's Discours de la méthode. It does indeed owe much to philosophical enquiry into the nature of being, establishing the existential novel in French well before Sartre. However, he later revealed that it was Dunne's An Experiment with Time which he intended to translate, although his reading of Descartes did play a major role in his conception of the work, particularly in imparting ‘le doute méthodique à l'égard de son art’. The novel otherwise obeys a strict set of formal rules such as might govern the construction of a poem—the numerous characters appear and disappear in patterns according with Queneau's notion that ‘on peut faire rimer des situations ou des personnages’—and each section of the novel observes the rules of the three unities. There are 91 such sections, 91 being the product of 7 and 13, Queneau's favourite numbers—7 because both his names have 7 letters and 13 for its unlucky and fatal connotations. The sum of the digits of 91 being 1, Queneau thus marked his novel with the numerical symbols of the beginning and the end (since for him 13 was associated with death).
[Ian Revie]
