Ayme, Woolf, Queneau, Gautier

Since my last post, I've read one issue of Eclectic Reading.

I have also read the complete works of Theophile Gautier, a Frenchman primarily remembered for his poetry. I grew up hearing my mother sing her own mother's favorite songs, which were Gautier poem's set to music. Well, damn. Two volumes later, I find that he was extremely maudlin by today's standards. He was a serial writer, but he was not the master of the feuilleton that Balzac was, or Dickens. He has novels set in foreign climes, which I can legitimately claim is Voltairian, seeing as I have read Voltaire and his works on China, for example, are not well informed. I've read the first (of 5) volume of Virginia Woolf's diaries, which so far are well-written but not remarkable. I read a book about the blue-stockings in 18th century England. I've read two of the three volumes of the complete works of Raymond Queneau. He was boring, until Les enfants du limon, which suddenly and unexpectedly experiments with form. These experiments probably merit him his place in literature, but these experiments are innocuous. They neither detract nor add more than a note of unexpectedness. I have ordered the third volume, as I have the last two volumes of Woolf, and now am reading Marcel Ayme, a great descriptor of IIIrd Republic France.