The Last Days by Raymond Queneau (1936)

This is the story of a few young men, and three old ones, milling around a part of Paris in the early twenties. The young men are all students and one of the old men is one of their teachers. We don't see them at the ecole, though, rather at various bars and occasionally at their homes. It represents the last days of the title in being the period just before all three old men die, and also being the time just before the young men graduate and divide off into their further lives. It is typically Queneauian in that it has a fair amount of play in it, both literally and in the sense of room for movement. His predilection for enjoying angles which illuminate these characters from odd viewpoints, or celebrate them in a way which treats them half-seriously, toying considerably with their obsessions, seeing through them ruthlessly and yet somehow fondly in an attitude of "it's all a game of cards, let's throw them up and see where they land", is prominent here. His special outlook of amused detachment is decorated in this instance quite sparingly with wordplay - it doesn't happen often, but just often enough to be notable. Words like chathowling, or bombinated, or lumbricated, or anticfray spitter through the text giving it the unmistakable look of the modern for its context. The old man who is their teacher is beset with doubts as to his right to teach geography, given his lack of travel. One of the other old men is a crook, devising schemes by which he might fleece people and acquire the cash to keep his mistress interested. One of the young men is quite retiring and tender and yet envious of his more explosive fellows. Another of them disappears overseas in an attempt to kickstart more of a life for himself. Another prepares to enter the army. Another tries to get a job as an assistant with the crook, but is upstaged by another wilier one, who then grows quickly disenchanted with his new boss' silly schemes. Women flit in and out of some of their lives, but never seem to stick. We take a tumble through all of this, amusedly looking at them without ever becoming haughty in the process - Queneau keeps us grounded. His final view of them is that of a barman who has recurred at points throughout our amble, and who has developed his own semi-mathematical and semi-astrological scheme of predicting events from a combination of cards and calculations, mainly for the purpose, when the time is right, of betting on the horses and repaying a giant debt of his father's, but also for giving advice to anyone who asks at the counter. This comes to fruition after the deaths of the three old men, and in the last chapter he watches with some self-congratulation at his window as the crowds of Paris mill by on all their schemes of life, mulling over how different everyone is, and yet how the same. It's a good point of reference for this gently funny, but also fateful and amusedly sour tour.