Zazie in the Metro

one of the great modern books a must for anyone with any sense of humor and wit. if you are serious forget it. if you like french silly, read it

Like his hero Lewis Carroll, Raymond Queneau was a polyglot, and a mathematician with a love of patterns, forms and games. He wrote a study of dog language in Carroll's 'Sylvie and Bruno', and 'Zazie' is his update of Alice to the Parisian Wonderland of the late 1950s, although it is not clear whether Zazie is an anti-Alice, bringing chaos to a normal society, or whether she is a precocious, sensible, curious (if foul-mouthed) child faced with a blinkingly unstable universe: Zazie is notably passive in the book's final third, when the linguistic, philosophical, temporal, narrative, spatial and sexual dissolutions collapse into a frenzy of barmy physical violence. the book as a whole sees Rabelais and Diderot rewriting the Arabian Nights. Each chapter plays like a Ionesco drama, a sustained, rhythmic dialogue where the disparity between bizarre event and the disintegrating attempts of language to express it, creates a gap where logic contracts, explodes and comes back together in an hilarious anti-logic. Not only are the borders of dream and reality, plausibility and fantasy, role play and identity broken down, but Queneau's narrative procedures - at once Joycean in its plenitude, and startling in its gaping ellipses - further confuse the reader. 'Zazie' is Queneau's most 'plausible' novel, in that much of its fun lies in its Parisian locales, and its comedy at the expense of romantic cliches about the city; but it is also a true Surrealist novel, both in breaking down the normality of the real, and in asserting that the only way you can get what you want is to dream.

Queneau offers a caleidoscope of satirical views about Paris and the people there, and he populates his novel with truly bizarre guys. Zazie is a perhaps twelve-year old girl that comes to Paris with her mother for some days; the mother visits her lover, and Zazie visits her uncle Gabriel. Gabriel works as a dancer (with a balley costume) in a gays' night-club without being homosexual himself. Some of his friends (a shoemaker, a pub owner, a parakeet, a taxi driver, Gabriel's wife, an almost-rapist) make the scene complete.Queneau does not forget to fill the book with swearwords and other vulgarities that are common in Paris, and he leaves no opportunity out to make everyone look ridiculous - a bus full of tourists, the "gendarmerie", the Parisian car drivers...I laughed a lot.

Raymond Queneau's comic cult novel is an unjustly neglected classic that was once distributed by the same French publishing house that handled Burroughs' Naked Lunch and Miller's Tropic Of Cancer when no one else would dare. Zazie is a sassy, cynical, foulmouthed little girl who arrives in Paris to visit her uncle, a female impersonator. What Zazie really wants is to ride the Metro. Alas, the Metro workers are on strike, so our little heroine goes off on her own in search of adventure, driving her poor uncle nuts in the process. This wonderful book manages to be funny and heartwarming while maintaining a raunchy, satirical edge. A perfect book for a rainy day! Definitely not for children or the easily offended, but great entertainment for young-at-heart adults. Be sure to see Louis Malle's great 1960 movie version, which he directs with the pace and energy of a Roadrunner cartoon!