Raymond Queneau: Un rude hiver | A Hard Winter (1939)

Like, for instance, 'Bouville' in Sartre's novel La Nausée (1938), Armand Salacrou's play Boulevard Durand (1960) and many other works, this is a book set in Le Havre. The period is World War I, and Raymond Queneau, born in Le Havre, spent the first seventeen years of his life there until the end of the war. The main character in Un rude hiver is Bernard Lehameau – a lieutenant now recovering from schrapnel wounds – who lost his mother, his wife and his first sister-in-law in a cinema fire in Le Havre on 21 February 1903: the date, it just so happens, is the date Queneau was born.

Lehameau is an ambivalent and contradictory character who enlivens the lives of two children – Annette (aged 14) and Polo (aged 5) – by taking them to the cinema and treating them in other ways, although problems set in when Annette falls in love with him. In fact he's already in love anyway – with the young English woman Helena Weeds from the Women's Army Auxiliary Corps (WAAC), who is temporarily based in Le Havre. But then, how can a person tell he's in love with someone if he hasn't had sex since his wife died thirteen years before?

And then there are his ideas, his (somewhat paradoxical loathing) of the working class, his wishing that Germany were a protectorate of France, etc. In the end he comes together with Annette and Polo's elder sister, the prostitute Madeleine.

There are many other characters in this odd novel, although many years before Zazie dans le métro there is a half-similar evident love of playing with language, not only obscure French words but deforming English as in the words 'un fleurte', 'poudigne' and 'visqui', or whole sentences such as 'Zey lâffe, bicose zey dou notte undèrrstande'.