As comfortable mingling with the Oulipo group in Paris -LRB- Georges Perec , Harry Mathews , Raymond Queneau and others , who spliced the DNA of literature with overt surrealist games -RRB- as he was explicating his love for and debt to Hemingway , Stevenson and the Brothers Grimm , Calvino seemed never to have compromised in his elegant explorations of whatever made him curious in nature , art or his own sensory or intellectual life .