Below is a fresh retelling employing the narrative ma-
terials provided by Queneau's "Notations" chapter in his
Exercises, a reiteration incorporating the opening lines of
twenty two famous novels drawn from the hundred best
as determined by the American Book Review.
You don't know about me without you have read
a book by the name of Exercises in Style, but that ain't
no matter. Call me Busman -- or Stately Plump Buck
Mulligan if you've a mind -- and this is the saddest story
you have ever heard. (In a sense I am Jacob Horner and
I write this sitting in the kitchen sink.)
If you really want to hear about it, the first thing
you'll probably want to know is where I was born. I am
a Frenchman, Paris born – Paris, that city of screaming
which comes across the sky. For a long time, on bright
cold days in April, with the clocks striking thirteen, I
would leave my bed early so as to catch an S-line bus.
The platform at the back of that bus is a foreign country;
they do things differently there.
Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of this tale,
or whether that station shall be held by some grotesque
skinny-necked twenty-six-year-old commuter in a string-
banded fedora, this page must show. Happy commuters
are all alike; every unhappy commuter is unhappy in his
own way. The Contrescarpe-Champerret busrun, past Eve
and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of boulevard,
brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to
Cour de Rome in front of gare Saint-Lazare. It is a truth
universally acknowledged, that a single commuter in pos-
session of a faulty overcoat, may be in want of a button.
Many hours later, as that odd fellow with the unusual
hat (and the doubtless defective outerwear) faced the
firing-squad inquisitions of his clotheshorse friend, he
was to remember that moment earlier in the afternoon
he became so annoyed when, as each rush-hour rider
exited the bus, the man standing adjacent to his leg icily
jostled him. "La-dee-dah! Like lightning I dive, like my
loins are afire," he thought as he leapt into a just-vacated
seat. "Surely this is the worst of times. And yet it is the
best of times, for I am not invisible, man, and if I am
out of my mind, it's all right with me."
The novels pilfered, altered and married with the
narrative are, in the order they are so abused and with
their ranking number in parentheses, The Adventures
of Huckleberry Finn (12), Moby Dick (1), Ulysses (21),
The Good Soldier (18), The End of the Road (34), I
Capture the Castle (82), The Catcher in the Rye (16),
The Adventures of Augie March (89), Gravity's Rainbow
(3), Swann's Way (40), 1984 (8), The Go-Between (78),
David Copperfield (20), Anna Karenina (6), Finnegans
Wake (7), Pride and Prejudice (2), One Hundred Years
of Solitude (4), Lolita (5), A Tale of Two Cities (9),
Invisible Man (10) and Herzog (69).
