Zazie dans le métro Reading Order

Zazie dans le métro (Zazie in the Metro, 1959) by Raymond Queneau is the most widely read and immediately pleasurable of the Queneau novels — a comic tour de force that brings a foul-mouthed twelve-year-old girl from the provinces to Paris for a weekend with her uncle Gabriel, who turns out to be a nightclub dancer performing as a woman, and unfolds across two days of escalating chaos as Zazie pursues her one ambition (to ride the metro, which is on strike) and accumulates a crowd of increasingly bizarre companions. Queneau's prose in Zazie dans le métro is written in what he called 'neo-français' — a phonetically spelled, grammatically anarchic French that represents spoken contemporary Parisian speech against the formal conventions of written French, collapsing the distinction between what people say and what literature permits them to say. The novel is one of the great comic novels of the twentieth century, and Zazie herself is one of its great comic characters — precocious, ruthless, entirely without illusions, and possessed of a vocabulary of abuse that functions as a kind of radical honesty. Louis Malle adapted it into a film in 1960 that is almost as anarchic as the novel. Zazie dans le métro is the best entry point to Queneau for readers who want to start with the most exhilarating work first.