Publication
Amsterdam De Bezige Bij 2004
ISBN
9023412656 / 9789023412656
Language
Collections
Description
Impish, foul-mouthed Zazie arrives in Paris from the country to stay with her uncle Gabriel. All she really wants to do is ride the metro, but finding it shut because of a strike, Zazie looks for other means of amusement and is soon caught up in a comic adventure that becomes wilder and more manic by the minute. In 1960 Queneau's cult classic was made into a hugely successful film by Louis Malle. Packed full of word play and phonetic games, Zazie in the Metro remains as stylish and witty as ever.
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User reviews
LibraryThing member donato
I'm going to be mean and give this only 3 stars. But only because I think the translation is bad.
Sure translating Queneau is not easy, but I guess I was spoiled by Calvino's translation of "Les fleurs bleues" ("I fiori blu", "The Blue Flowers"). This translation has things like "gorgonzola",
And then there's only one footnote, to explain an untranslatable pun. Really? That was the only untranslatable thing of note?
Other than that, it was funny, it was crazy, it was all jazzy mixed up linguistically loopy, it was, well, Queneau. It was literary and cinematic at the same time (haven't seen the flick yet). But not cinematic in the way all contemporary prose tends to be (stories created and set down with the imagination of a future screenplay)... more in the way characters would gesture while speaking, (unspecifically), in its slapstick silliness... like Queneau wanted to splice together not just different literary styles but also the cinematic, the cartoony, the comic book...
[1] Wow, the situation is worse than I thought. Thanks to Google books, I now know what's in the original. It says, "Du brie? Du camembert?", which are actually quite well known French cheeses [2]. Not only that, the translator didn't even attempt to find Italian equivalents (which is what I thought he'd done...I was imagining roquefort and some kind of fromage blanc). The so-called cappuccino, on the other hand, is "café-crème" in the original. What a terrible translator this guy is!
[2] Admittedly, and paradoxically, they are probably more well-known in America (and Britain) than they are in Italy [3]. And in fact, the English translation maintains the French names. "Café-crème", on the other hand, becomes simply "coffee".
[3] Italians tend to be food chauvinists. Translations such as this certainly don't help (and prove my point).
Sure translating Queneau is not easy, but I guess I was spoiled by Calvino's translation of "Les fleurs bleues" ("I fiori blu", "The Blue Flowers"). This translation has things like "gorgonzola",
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"stracchino" and "cappuccino". Oh really? I didn't realize the French (Parisians even, in 1959 even) ate Italian cheese and drank Italian coffee. Would it really have been so difficult to leave the French names for those cheeses in? [1]And then there's only one footnote, to explain an untranslatable pun. Really? That was the only untranslatable thing of note?
Other than that, it was funny, it was crazy, it was all jazzy mixed up linguistically loopy, it was, well, Queneau. It was literary and cinematic at the same time (haven't seen the flick yet). But not cinematic in the way all contemporary prose tends to be (stories created and set down with the imagination of a future screenplay)... more in the way characters would gesture while speaking, (unspecifically), in its slapstick silliness... like Queneau wanted to splice together not just different literary styles but also the cinematic, the cartoony, the comic book...
[1] Wow, the situation is worse than I thought. Thanks to Google books, I now know what's in the original. It says, "Du brie? Du camembert?", which are actually quite well known French cheeses [2]. Not only that, the translator didn't even attempt to find Italian equivalents (which is what I thought he'd done...I was imagining roquefort and some kind of fromage blanc). The so-called cappuccino, on the other hand, is "café-crème" in the original. What a terrible translator this guy is!
[2] Admittedly, and paradoxically, they are probably more well-known in America (and Britain) than they are in Italy [3]. And in fact, the English translation maintains the French names. "Café-crème", on the other hand, becomes simply "coffee".
[3] Italians tend to be food chauvinists. Translations such as this certainly don't help (and prove my point).
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LibraryThing member thorold
This is one of those rare cases where the book and the film are both worth the effort. Raymond Queneau spent fourteen years tinkering away at this superficially light and fluffy romp through Paris, and Louis Malle turned it into a wonderful, hilarious film.
Little Zazie comes to Paris to be parked
The storyline is full of eccentric characters, repetitions and bizarre twists of logic, but what Queneau is really trying to do here is to explore the complicated interface between the way people actually talk and the way language is written down on paper. If you're not a native speaker of Parisian French, you may have a hard time decoding the very funny mix of puns, malapropisms, run-together words, dialect, and good old-fashioned swearing. You're unlikely to find bloudjinnzes in your dictionary, but it's always more fun when the penny doesn't drop until a line or two later. Reading the line aloud often helps.
The current Gallimard edition comes with a couple of "out-takes" from early drafts of the novel, completing the confusion between the book and the DVD...
Little Zazie comes to Paris to be parked
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with her uncle Gabriel for 36 hours whilst her mother spends some quality time with a new boyfriend. Zazie's one ambition is to ride on the Métro, but the ticket-punchers are on strike, so she's out of luck.The storyline is full of eccentric characters, repetitions and bizarre twists of logic, but what Queneau is really trying to do here is to explore the complicated interface between the way people actually talk and the way language is written down on paper. If you're not a native speaker of Parisian French, you may have a hard time decoding the very funny mix of puns, malapropisms, run-together words, dialect, and good old-fashioned swearing. You're unlikely to find bloudjinnzes in your dictionary, but it's always more fun when the penny doesn't drop until a line or two later. Reading the line aloud often helps.
The current Gallimard edition comes with a couple of "out-takes" from early drafts of the novel, completing the confusion between the book and the DVD...
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LibraryThing member hbergander
Once as a youngster I stole in Andorra-La-Vellas’s department store blue jeans. Inspired by Zazie’s theft, which I studied the day before. I fell immediately in love and wanted to impress her. During the return to Madrid, the new blue jeans squeezed the balls. Too tight pants! Whenever in
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future it got a bit tight between my legs, Zazie muscled in. Who, by the way, nearly did not wake up in time for to explore the Metro of Paris. Show Less
LibraryThing member missizicks
This is a hoot of a book. Surreal like Flann O'Brien is surreal. The word play is fun and gives the prose its rhythm. Zazie is a feisty potty-mouth who stirs up the weekend of her uncle and his friends. On her account they encounter all kinds of rum characters, and largely take it in their stride.
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Good fun, all of it. Show Less
LibraryThing member syntheticvox
A sweet, funny, sometimes bawdy story of little Zazie visiting her family in Paris, wanting to ride the metro for the first time.
LibraryThing member JimmyChanga
Talk, talk, that's all you can do!Seems like a fitting description of this novel which is just an excuse for slapstick language comedy. Some of the witty language was amusing and clever, but overall I don't see the point of this romp. It got sillier and sillier, but not in a way that was funnier
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and funnier. The thing kinda read like a writing exercise, actually. And the characters are like flashy cartoons. I never thought slapstick was possible in book form, but here it is. I've never enjoyed slapstick comedy (though I try at least a few times a year and am always disappointed... just not my thing), but I can see how someone can really love this book if it is their thing. I enjoyed the wordplay, to some degree, but it got old kinda fast. It is quite impressive, though, that this was a translation. I'm sure the word-jokes were entirely different in French. Show Less
LibraryThing member jon1lambert
Wonderful cover design - metro tickets use as bodies.
LibraryThing member debnance
It is hard to read a book when you do not like the main character. At all.
And what if the book is written in some sort of odd Ulysses-ish manner? Not inviting.
Only two things kept me reading along: (1) the story is set in (ahhh!) Paris and (2) the book is on our list of 1001 Children’s Books You
So there. I finished it. I didn’t like it. But I finished it.
And what if the book is written in some sort of odd Ulysses-ish manner? Not inviting.
Only two things kept me reading along: (1) the story is set in (ahhh!) Paris and (2) the book is on our list of 1001 Children’s Books You
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Must Read Before You Grow Up.So there. I finished it. I didn’t like it. But I finished it.
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LibraryThing member Helenliz
A slightly strange book. Reads in a very cinematic manner, but doesn't describe visually the person of Zazie at all. Her age, apperance is all left completely to the reader's imagination
LibraryThing member GingerbreadMan
Back in the days when Flea and I were rose cheeked students, my dorm room had no TV. Instead we would spend our evenings naked in my narrow bed, reading aloud. This brusque, wobbly novel was a favorite back then, making us break out in giggles, and I was looking forward to a reread.
The heroine of
What follows is a rather mad romp through the streets of Paris. Mostly told in crude dialogue, full of invectives, we follow a laconic Zazie as her uncle is getting kidnapped by a horde of enthusiastic tourists, though numerous bar fights and taxi rides in over crowded streets and ending in a full scale siege at the Halles. Packed with puns, quirky dialogue and absurd detail, this is a book that makes your head spin. Occasionally trying just a little too hard, occasionally a little sexist, but mostly high speed fun. I have no idea how the english translation is, but if it’s as good as the Swedish one, this is a book worth checking out.
The heroine of
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this book is a foul-mouthed world weary country girl in her early teens. Her own father has drunkenly tried to molest her, which has caused her mother to put an axe in his head. Now she’s sent to her uncle (who is considered ”safe”, since he’s working as a ballerina in a gay club) in Paris to recover. Zazie is uttelry unfazed by her experiences, and equally unimpressed by Paris. The only thing she was looking forward to was going on the Metro, only to find out there’s a bloody strike! Annoyed, she sets out on her own, to at least get a pair of blue jeans. It isn’t long before a strange policeman starts to make passes at her.What follows is a rather mad romp through the streets of Paris. Mostly told in crude dialogue, full of invectives, we follow a laconic Zazie as her uncle is getting kidnapped by a horde of enthusiastic tourists, though numerous bar fights and taxi rides in over crowded streets and ending in a full scale siege at the Halles. Packed with puns, quirky dialogue and absurd detail, this is a book that makes your head spin. Occasionally trying just a little too hard, occasionally a little sexist, but mostly high speed fun. I have no idea how the english translation is, but if it’s as good as the Swedish one, this is a book worth checking out.
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LibraryThing member fist
Zazie is a young girl who comes to stay with her aunt and uncle in Paris for a few days. In spite of the title, she'll never get a chance to ride the metro.
Queneau loves to play with language, be it through vocabulary, style and spelling: arcane words appear, quoted from the dictionary and
I found the Zazie character mildly disturbing (a bit like when one is viewing earlier Woody Allen movies featuring a sexually omniscient female lead who is decades younger than the male lead): she is a prepubescent girl (9? 12?) who nevertheless seems very sexually aware of her power over older gentlement, and at times even manages to be a mental dominatrix who loves to denigrate the male characters' virility. It would make sense then, that this evil nymphet "who can make mountains quarrel" (whose name reminds one, not coincidentally, of the word "zizanie") is as fascinated as she is by her uncle's alleged homosexuality, because if true, that would make her powerless.
Right after finishing his 190-page book, I felt I needed to read a 500-page companion guide if I wanted to understand all wordplay and intertextual references. But I'll give that a pass.
Queneau loves to play with language, be it through vocabulary, style and spelling: arcane words appear, quoted from the dictionary and
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neologisms, alliterations and wordplay abound, style registers vary from street slang to very formal and archaic (the subjonctif passé makes a few appearances, rendered either in orthodox spelling or phonetically like "upu" for "eût pu"). Especially the vocabulary makes this a hard book to judge for someone who's not a native speaker of French. I found the Zazie character mildly disturbing (a bit like when one is viewing earlier Woody Allen movies featuring a sexually omniscient female lead who is decades younger than the male lead): she is a prepubescent girl (9? 12?) who nevertheless seems very sexually aware of her power over older gentlement, and at times even manages to be a mental dominatrix who loves to denigrate the male characters' virility. It would make sense then, that this evil nymphet "who can make mountains quarrel" (whose name reminds one, not coincidentally, of the word "zizanie") is as fascinated as she is by her uncle's alleged homosexuality, because if true, that would make her powerless.
Right after finishing his 190-page book, I felt I needed to read a 500-page companion guide if I wanted to understand all wordplay and intertextual references. But I'll give that a pass.
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LibraryThing member xieouyang
This is a very humorous book. The humor is totally unexpected, often absurd, but nonetheless very enjoyable. Some of the characters, many?, are very outlandish; their behavior is zany; their language sometimes borders on the obsence.
Zazie, the main character, is a young girl of unknown age, could
I found myself going back to read some chapters because they were so enjoyable. They actually made me laugh outloud.
Zazie, the main character, is a young girl of unknown age, could
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be pre-adolescent, who is very sassy, and has a mildly foulmouth. But she is very clever and gives life to all the other characters with her crazy behavior.I found myself going back to read some chapters because they were so enjoyable. They actually made me laugh outloud.
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Awards
Original publication date
1959