Raymond Queneau remains unclassifiable. It is as fruitless to group him with a single literary school as it is to reduce one of his intentionally bad puns to a single meaning. Recalling the Surrealists, Queneau rolls words like dice. Anticipating the "new novel," his plots come unravelled like scarfs caught on a snag. With the publication of Le Vol d'Icare and its translation, the "franc-tireur" of French literature has struck again, casting about the literary scene with thrusts of a rapier wit. It should come as no surprise that The Flight of Icarus is neither fish nor fowl, that it explores several topics, and dabbles with several genres all at once.

A light-hearted pastiche of the "new novels'" narrative austerity; a historical reconstruction of literary circles in the 1890s; a spoof of the clichés of the mystery story; and a novel about the novel told in the...