books

Ninety-nine times a man boards the crowded S bus, quarrels with a fellow passenger over some imagined jostling, snatches a vacated seat, and is glimpsed two hours later outside the Gare Saint-Lazare being told to move a button on his overcoat. That is the whole of it. By the bottom of the first page you already possess every fact the book will ever give you. Everything that follows is repetition, and the astonishing thing is that the repetition is the point, the pleasure, and very nearly the entire argument for the book's existence.

Queneau's wager, first laid down in 1947, is that style is not the dressing on a story but the thing itself. Strip the anecdote to its bones and it barely qualifies as an event. Yet rendered as a sonnet, as an official letter, as a publisher's blurb, as onomatopoeia, as cross-examination, as a litany of spoonerisms or a cascade of botanical metaphor, the same nothing becomes ninety-nine distinct experiences. The mundane is revealed as raw material, and the transformations range from the expected (past tense, reported speech) through the quirky (couplets, "You Know" with its stammer of conversational filler) to the frankly deranged (permutations of letters by groups of two, three, four and five). It is a masterclass in rhetoric disguised as a joke, and a joke that keeps detonating long after you think you have understood the mechanism.

What rescues it from being a mere intellectual stunt is how funny it is. The "Abusive" chapter heartily despises everyone involved; "Opera English" inflates the squabble to Wagnerian grandeur; the metaphorical version turns the long-necked youth into a giraffe in a feathered hat. Read a few at a time and the variations land like a series of perfectly timed punchlines, each one craning to see whether you noticed what it just did. There is real wit in watching a writer attack the same trivial scene from yet another improbable angle and win.

The honest caveat is that this is not a book to be read cover to cover in a sitting. Consumed greedily, it curdles. The same scene ninety-nine times can feel less like a fireworks display than a man clearing his throat in a hundred keys, and the suspicion creeps in that a structure built on repetition offers no narrative reward, no character, no development, nothing to carry you forward except the next variation. There is no suspense in knowing the bus will always arrive and the button will always need moving. Taken in one draught it can read as twenty years of experience that is really one year lived twenty times. The remedy is simple: a chapter or two a day, spread over weeks or months, which lets each exercise register as the small marvel it is rather than another lap of an exhausting track. Approached that way, the apparent monotony becomes a rhythm, and the book reveals itself as something closer to a daily devotional for people who love language.

It would be dishonest to discuss this edition without putting Barbara Wright at its centre, because what is being read here is at least as much hers as Queneau's. The book was long held to be untranslatable, so bound up is its play in the textures of French, and Wright herself initially thought the author was crazy to want it attempted. That she succeeded, with his blessing and his "heartiest congratulations," is one of the quiet heroic acts of postwar translation. She did not so much carry the exercises across as reinvent them, finding English equivalents for puns and constraints that simply do not exist outside their original tongue. Cockney stands in where Paris slang cannot follow; the spirit is preserved even where the literal sense had to be abandoned. The result is a text that has grown apart from its source and stands as its own creative object, which is why it topped a list of the fifty outstanding translations of fifty years. Reading it, you become aware of two virtuosos performing at once, and the line between them blurs delightfully.

Some nuance is inevitably lost in any translation, and here, where the medium is the entire message, that loss matters more than usual. But it also proves Queneau's thesis from an unexpected direction: change the language and you change the work, exactly as changing the style does. Exercises in Style is finally less a book than a provocation about what books are made of. It will not move you or keep you up turning pages. It will, if you let it, permanently alter how you hear every sentence you read afterward, which is a stranger and more durable gift than most plots manage.