The blue flowers

The blue flowers ( French original title: Les Fleurs bleues ) is a 1965 novel by Raymond Queneau .

The German translation by Eugen Helmlé appeared in 1966, there is an Italian translation by Italo Calvino .

Construction of the work

At the head of the book is a motto based on the so-called butterfly dream of the Chinese philosopher and poet Tschuang-tse : Tschuang-tse dreams that he is a butterfly, but isn't the butterfly dreaming that he is Tschuang-tse?

The two main characters of the work are the somewhat strange Cidrolin, who lived on a river barge in 1964, and the Duke von Auge from 1264, who along the course of history, together with his warhorse, moved towards Cidrolin through the centuries. They do not appear together, but the novel tells, like in a parallel montage, in one chapter about one of the two, in the next about the other. At the end of the chapter, the respective protagonist falls asleep and begins to dream of the other, whereupon the next chapter carries out this dream.

In addition to this surreal interweaving of narrative perspectives and times, the novel is peppered with deliberate anachronisms and allusions for which word misspellings are sometimes used.