Morale élémentaire, while it holds few surprises for the reader familiar with Raymond Queneau's earlier writings, represents nonetheless an important and fascinating achievement. Surrealist, poet, mathematician, novelist, humorist, linguistic explorer, Queneau is most of these again in his latest book. It has three parts, a sequence of fifty-one identically constructed verse poems and two groups of prose poems, a series of sixteen texts followed by a series of sixty-four. With one exception (the last poem in part two), no text takes up more than a page. The prose texts blend the narrative with the descriptive mode in such a way as to keep the "moral" just beyond our grasp, and all are graced with Queneau's characteristic wit.

The verse texts, a stunning tour de force, give us Queneau the student of linguistic production and the inventor of poetic forms at his best. Every text has precisely the...