Recommendations
Books Like Zazie dans le métro by Raymond Queneau
Books for readers who loved the foul-mouthed Zazie and Queneau's anarchic neo-français comic novel
Zazie dans le métro (1959) is Queneau's most widely read novel — a twelve-year-old girl in Paris to ride the metro (which is on strike), a transvestite uncle, escalating chaos, and phonetically transcribed spoken French. These 8 books share its comic energy, its rebellious young protagonist, and its love of linguistic anarchism.
- 1
Buy on AmazonExercices de style
by Raymond Queneau
The formal companion — shows the Queneau method in its most concentrated and systematised form; read alongside Zazie to understand the linguistic experiments from a different angle.
- 2
Buy on AmazonLes Fleurs bleues
by Raymond Queneau
The late companion novel — the Duc d'Auge is the perfect companion for Zazie, another magnificent comic character defined by magnificent grumpiness.
- 3
Buy on AmazonLolita
by Vladimir Nabokov
The other canonical child at the centre of a disturbing adult world — Nabokov's linguistic virtuosity in English is the closest parallel to Queneau's neo-français, and Lolita's experience of adults who cannot see her is the dark version of Zazie's experience of adults she runs rings around.
- 4Buy on Amazon
The Catcher in the Rye
by J.D. Salinger
An adolescent's-eye view of adult inauthenticity — Holden's voice is to American English roughly what Zazie's neo-français is to French: a refusal of the formal conventions that adults use to disguise what they actually mean.
- 5Buy on Amazon
Flann O'Brien at War
by Flann O'Brien
The Irish linguistic anarchist — At Swim-Two-Birds and The Third Policeman share Zazie's delight in the comic possibilities of a language pushed to its limits, with the same mixture of formal experiment and knockabout comedy.
- 6
Buy on AmazonHuckleberry Finn
by Mark Twain
Huck's river journey narrated in his own vernacular voice — the great American predecessor to Zazie in the comic novel of the child who outsmarts every adult they encounter, told in a language that refuses literary propriety.
- 7
Buy on AmazonAlice's Adventures in Wonderland
by Lewis Carroll
A girl who questions every convention of the adult world she falls into — Alice's logic confronting adult illogic is the Victorian British version of Zazie confronting Parisian adult chaos.
- 8
Buy on AmazonCandide
by Voltaire
The French comic tour de force of the naive protagonist encountering the world's absurdity — Zazie is the twentieth-century descendant of Candide's innocent who sees clearly what the sophisticated cannot.
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