We Always Treat Women Too Well

Raymond Queneau (1903-1976) was born in the French town of Le Havre and educated at the Sorbonne. He performed his military service in Morocco. An early association with the Surrealists ended in 1929, and after completing a scholarly study of literary madmen of the nineteenth century for which he was unable to find a publisher, Queneau turned to fiction, writing his first novel, Le Chiendent (published as Witch Grass by NYRB Classics), in Greece in the summer of 1932. Influenced by James Joyce and Lewis Carroll, Queneau sought to reinvigorate French literature, grown feeble through formalism, with a strong dose of language as really spoken. He further encouraged innovation by founding, with the mathematician François Le Lionnais, the famous group OULIPO (Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle), which investigated literary composition based on the application of strict formal or mathematical procedures (members of the group included Italo Calvino, Georges Perec, and Harry Mathews). Queneau's many books, which typically blur the boundaries between fiction, poetry, and the essay, include Pierrot mon ami, The Sunday of Life, Zazie in the Metro (made into a movie by Louis Malle), and Exercises in Style; under the name of Sally Mara, he published We Always Treat Women Too Well, a brilliant comic spoof on the excesses of smutty popular novels. Queneau was the editor of the Encyclopédie de la Pléiade as well as a fine poet, whose lyric "Si tu t'imagines" was a hit for the celebrated postwar chanteuse Juliette Gréco. »

Barbara Wright is one of the premier English translators of modern French literature. In addition to Raymond Queneau, she has also translated such authors as Alfred Jarry, Nathalie Sarraute, Pierre Albert-Birot, and Patrick Modiano. »

John Updike was born in 1932 in Shillington, Pennsylvania. In 1954 he began to publish in The New Yorker, where he continued to contribute short stories, poems, and criticism until his death in 2009. His novels have won the Pulitzer Prize, among other awards. His last books were the novel The Widows of Eastwick and Due Considerations, a collection of his essays and criticism. »

We Always Treat Women Too Well

By Raymond Queneau
Translated from the French by Barbara Wright
Introduction by John Updike

We Always Treat Women Too Well was first published as a purported work of pulp fiction by one Sally Mara, but this novel by Raymond Queneau is a further manifestation of his sly, provocative, wonderfully wayward genius. Set in Dublin during the 1916 Easter rebellion, it tells of a nubile beauty who finds herself trapped in the central post office when it is seized by a group of rebels. But Gertie Girdle is no common pushover, and she quickly devises a coolly lascivious strategy by which, in very short order, she saves the day for king and country. Queneau's wickedly funny send-up of cheap smut—his response to a popular bodice-ripper of the 1940s—exposes the link between sexual fantasy and actual domination while celebrating the imagination's power to transmute crude sensationalism into pleasure pure and simple.

Reviews

An eccentric figure . . . the not too distant future may reveal him to be a master, one of the few who will stay the course in a century in which there have been so many flawed maestros.
— Italo Calvino

Obscenity and tenderness, subtlety and violence: for readers not immediately put off by that mixture, there is in Queneau's novel the chance of a deliciously fast-moving, enormously funny experience. It is a novel that Flann O'Brien would surely have enjoyed.
— The Times Literary Supplement

Queneau has the temerity to tell us that the bases of reality are dissolving around us as we watch. The world will not last. And he has the gall to respond to the news with unsuppressed chuckles.
— Roger Shattuck

Format: Paperback
Retail Price: $14.00
Price: $10.50 (25% off)

Jan 31, 2003
200 pages
ISBN: 159017030X
9781590170304
All Literature in Translation
NYRB Classics
Literature in French

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