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by Raymond Queneau
In this delightful, cinema-inspired daydream of a novel, an identity-shifting protagonist uses the everyday inspirations of his life to catapult himself into the realm of imagination, blurring the boundaries between reality and fantasy.
The Skin of Dreams is a novel of waking dreams. Even as he lives his life, Jacques L'Aumône, its hero, daydreams a hundred other possible lives. A few lines on a page, a chance encounter, a remark overheard in passing, any of these are enough to kick things into gear and send him off outside of himself to become a boxer, a general, a bishop, or a lord. He lives alongside his life with diligence and steadfastness; and the passage from real to dream is so natural for him that he no longer knows precisely which him he is. Eventually he becomes an actor in Hollywood, and the basis of countless dreams for others. This Jacques L'Aumône, like the characters who surround him, has the same sort of haunting and fluid consistency as someone that we might dream of in our beds at night. And reverie, here, is born through the tale's humor, which is as gentle as it is cruel, as well as by way of a writing technique that is itself drawn from one of Queneau's great loves, the cinema.
"This breezy and witty episodic novel from Queneau (1903–1976), originally published in 1944 and newly translated by Clarke, chronicles the episodic adventures of a young dreamer....Clarke generally has a nimble way with Queneau's wordplay and neologisms. This winning satire demonstrates the rewards of cultivating one's imagination." —Publishers Weekly
"In this fantasy of fantasies, an imaginative boy becomes, after a time, a successful movie star....The novel's playfulness with language borrows from Joyce; its noir-isms and grand fantasies predict gangster rap. There is a refreshing lack of morality in the novel. Jacques' fantasies are not condoned, and his selfishness in making some of them real is not condemned. Read it in one sitting and find yourself more open to your own daydreams." —Kirkus Reviews
This information about The Skin of Dreams (New York Review Books Classics) was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Raymond Queneau (1903–1976) was born in the French town of Le Havre and educated at the Sorbonne. 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. 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. Queneau's books, which typically blur the boundaries between fiction, poetry, and the essay, include Witch Grass and We Always Treat Women Too Well, both available as NYRB Classics.
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