At his death in 1976, Raymond Queneau was one of France's most eminent men of letters--novelist, poet, essayist, editor, scientist, mathematician, and, more to the point, pataphysician. And only a pataphysician nurtured lovingly on surrealist excess could have come up with The Blue Flowers, Queneau's 1964 novel, now reissued as a New Directions Paperbook. To a pataphysician all things are equal, there is no improvement or progress in the human condition,...