Odile: Roman

Returned from war, Roland Travy hides in math.

The protagonist of Raymond Queneau’s 1937 novel, Odile, Travy styles himself an “amateur mathematician” as a means to submerge the irrationalities around him. The alternate world described by numbers is his escape: from his battlefield trauma, from the threat of love, and from the grandiose incoherence of a Parisian cast of café-goers, criminals, communists, countesses and quasi-Surrealists.

Mary Reynolds, who produced bindings for at least a dozen of Queneau’s books, represents the colorless but comfortingly binary solvability of this world of math in black calfskin with a white vellum overlay, and sets the author and title as an equation. Although Reynolds usually stamped or impressed her titles with metal type, here she instead renders the lettering by hand in black ink: an intimate gesture that tugs against its own visual austerity.

Inside, undyed endsheets of sensuously fibrous Japanese paper suggest the subdermal turmoil of Travy’s tangled relationships. These entanglements, in the end, serve as the escape from his escape, drawing him into life from beneath his formulae.

As with her bindings for Queneau’s Saint Glinglin and Un rude hiver, Reynolds makes concrete her delight in the text. Although we may be unable to solve for the cube root of Queneau, we are able to witness here a bookbinder engaged, as the author’s friend, in a playfully tactile practice with the roots of his work.