Our Reading Journey

In the Summer of 2021, we surrendered to the chaotic, kaleidoscopic streets of Paris alongside Zazie—a foul-mouthed, impertinent provincial girl from Berry with one singular obsession: to ride the Parisian subway. Hosted by her Uncle Gabriel (a nightclub performer whose manliness is its own hilarious subversion), Zazie navigates a gallery of picturesque characters, from fake policemen to talkative parrots. Ironically, our discussion centered on the great missing element of the book: the fact that Zazie never actually sets foot on the Metro due to a strike! This diversion became our central metaphor for life itself—an adventure where your plans are constantly hijacked by reality, leading to unexpected places far more revealing than the destination.

The intellectual core of our session was analyzing Zazie’s relentless "Why?" as a sharp, investigative tool. We debated how her generation, born after the trauma of the Second World War, used outspokenness to hold the older generation accountable for the obscure past of the Occupation. Beyond the plot, we marveled at Queneau’s Neo-français—a revolutionary linguistic style that phoneticizes speech (famously opening with "Doukipudonktan?") to bridge the gap between written and spoken French. We analyzed the novel as a burlesque parody of the epic, where the subway is a modern MacGuffin and the streets of Paris become a stage for an anarchic fable about identity, freedom, and the refusal to be silenced by "adult" hypocrisy. We concluded that Zazie is more than a rude child; she is a revolutionary figure in a France dreaming of emancipation.

About the Author

Raymond Queneau (1903–1976) was a co-founder of the Oulipo (Ouvroir de littérature potentielle) and a polymath who moved effortlessly between mathematics, philosophy, and surrealism. With Zazie dans le métro, he achieved a rare feat: a popular bestseller that was also a radical avant-garde experiment. Celebrated for his inventiveness and his role as a "master of the language," Queneau’s influence on 20th-century French letters is immeasurable. His work was immortalized on screen in 1960 by Louis Malle, whose cinematic adaptation captured the same frenetic, "New Wave" energy that Queneau brought to the page.