In all his novels, Raymond Queneau questions the process of history. Individual lives are drawn into historical disasters…. Les Fleurs bleues stands out as one novel in which history, as it relates individual and group experience, does not appear only in the dénouement….

Queneau makes no pretense to careful observation and recording of social mores. Rather, he examines the metaphysics of history, the rapport between general and particular circumstance, between event, experience and invention—his own, or that of his characters. Such problems inevitably lead him to be concerned with perception, both in life and in art, both conscious and unconscious. (p. 323)

Queneau's novels recognize none of the traditional criteria for vraisemblance except for that of cohesion. They shamelessly present pure fantasy instead of the judicious observation of verifiable realities. His adhesion to the actual instead of the abstract does not, for him, preclude gratuitous invention. He...