Zazie     by Raymond Queneau, Translated by Barbara Wright Original title: Zazie dans le métro Original language: French Published by Viking Penguin Pub. Date: 2001 Format: Paperback, 158 pages Dimensions: (in inches): 0.38 x 7.73 x 5.07 ISBN: 0142180041 List Price: $12.00, £7.99 Buy online from Amazon.co.uk for £6.39 Buy online from Amazon.com for $9.60 Published by Calder Pub. Date: 1982 Pub. Place: UK Format: 207 pages Not available for ordering

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These are the adventures of Zazie, a cheeky little girl left in her uncle Gabriel’s care for two days. It is her first time in Paris and she has just one thing on her mind — to ride on the métro. This is a real obsession, worsened by the fact that the métro workers are on strike. For want of anything better she crisscrosses Paris in a cab driven by her uncle’s friend and takes part in a series of semi-farcical events on the street, on top of the Eiffel Tower, in traffic jams. Her uncle Gabriel becomes Gabriella at night — he works as a drag artist in a night club — her mother turns out to be an axe murderer, there is a talking parrot in the café downstairs and a myriad of grotesque characters constantly run in and out of the book. The farce is Rabelaisian and the essence of this novel, its dialogue, is spiced up by Zazie’s rude comments as the adults’ comfortable view of the world wavers under the strain of her impertinent questions.


Queneau mixes registers of language to great comical effect, reviving the written language by instilling the liveliness of speech into it. Here his aim is not dissimilar to Céline’s — to shadow feeling closely with words, to take hold of it raw and before it has a chance to dress itself up in the good manners of conventional prose...


There is both aesthete and dreamer in Queneau and by using popular expressions, bits of Latin and English, phonetic spelling — Zazie drinks ‘cacocalos’ and wears ‘bloudjinnzes’ — snatches of songs and philosophy, Queneau introduces fantasy into the banal. Everyday life becomes imbued with poetry; there are parodic meditations on the meaning of life, and stacks of sarcastic allusions.


Zazie is the spirit of youth, yet she appears wise in the light of grown-up silliness. When her mother comes to collect her, she asks ‘did you see the métro?’, ‘No’, ‘What did you do, then?’, ‘I grew up’. Meanwhile, everybody, including the reader has benefited from a rejuvenating experience. Zazie is also the metaphor for the novel itself — a questioning of our linguistic habits. Beyond the abrasive humour we are reminded that there is no such thing as a ‘correct’ way to speak. This is a fun, invigorating celebration of hybridity, a delightful democratisation of language achieved by a great juggler of words.

‘On the terrace of the Café des Deux Palais, Gabriel, knocking back his fifth grenadine, was holding forth to an assembly whose attention seemed all the greater in that its francophony was more diffuse.

«Why,» he was saying, «why should one not tolerate this life, since so little suffices to deprive one of it? So little brings it into being, so little brightens it, so little blights it, so little bears it away. Otherwise, who would tolerate the blows of fate and the humiliations of a successful career, the swindling of grocers, the prices of butchers, the water of milkmen, the irritation of parents, the fury of teachers, the bawling of sergeant-majors, the turpitude of the beats, the lamentations of the dead-beats, the silence of infinite space, the smell of cauliflower or the passivity of the wooden horses on a merry-go-round, were it not for his knowledge that the bad and proliferative behaviour of certain minute cells (gesture) or the trajectory of a bullet traced by an involuntary, irresponsible, anonymous individual might unexpectedly come and cause all these cares to evaporate into the blue of the heavens. I, who now address you, have many times orientated my thoughts toward these problems while, dressed in a tutu, I expose to cretins like you my naturally fairly hirsute it must be admitted but professionally epilated thighs. I should add that if you so desire you can be present at this spectacle this very evening.»’ p130