Customer Reviews (2)

Alice in Paris.
Like his hero Lewis Carroll, Raymond Queneau was a polyglot, and a mathematician with a love of patterns, forms and games.He wrote a study of dog language in Carroll's 'Sylvie and Bruno', and 'Zazie' is his update of Alice to the Parisian Wonderland of the late 1950s, although it is not clear whether Zazie is an anti-Alice, bringing chaos to a normal society, or whether she is a precocious, sensible, curious (if foul-mouthed) child faced with a blinkingly unstable universe: Zazie is notably passive in the book's final third, when the linguistic, philosophical, temporal, narrative, spatial and sexual dissolutions collapse into a frenzy of barmy physical violence.

the book as a whole sees Rabelais and Diderot rewriting the Arabian Nights.Each chapter plays like a Ionesco drama, a sustained, rhythmic dialogue where the disparity between bizarre event and the disintegrating attempts of language to express it, creates a gap where logic contracts, explodes and comes back together in an hilarious anti-logic.Not only are the borders of dream and reality, plausibility and fantasy, role play and identity broken down, but Queneau's narrative procedures - at once Joycean in its plenitude, and startling in its gaping ellipses - further confuse the reader.

'Zazie' is Queneau's most 'plausible' novel, in that much of its fun lies in its Parisian locales, and its comedy at the expense of romantic cliches about the city; but it is also a true Surrealist novel, both in breaking down the normality of the real, and in asserting that the only way you can get what you want is to dream.

Strange and Funny!
Raymond Queneau has written a strange but tantalizing little novel about an adolescent named Zazie... she has a New York accent, and the mouth of a Henry Miller.Her misadventures in Paris, prove challenging to those around her,and amusing to the reader.It's am amusing collage of seemimgly misplaced dialogue and eccentric characters, yet is easy to read and laugh with.

(Note: Queneau is, I think, an underappreciated genius.You can find out more about him by looking up the book "The OULIPO COMPENDIUM" here at Amazon, which contains his extraordinary"One-hundred-trillion sonnets." "Oulipans: rats who build the labyrinth from which they plan to escape" -- Raymond Queneau).

Zazie is less of a labyrinth and more of a amusement park, a good introduction to this imaginative writer. Probably not for those easily offended (nor is "Zazie" herself), but a little treasure worth looking for. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

essential if provoking.
This guide is an invaluable resource for English readers of Queneau's most popular novel.No translation, even one as inspired as Barbara Wright's, can convey the complexity of Queneau's wordplay, which is simply untranslatable.Redfern gives a very useful explanatory list of the puns, neologisms, allusions, portmanteau words etc. that energise the novel, and shows how they are move than verbal showing-off, pointing to the novel's meanings and themes.

As a study of 'Zazie', the book is less successful.Being the first monograph on Queneau in English (1980), it is as much an introduction to the writer's life, work, themes and methods as it is of 'Zazie'.Redfern is especially concerned with Queneau's interest in language (his benign war between demotic and official French); his philosophical and aesthetic interests; and his place in the history of literary comedy.

This is all fair enough, but too often you get the impression Redfern doesn't take Queneau seriously enough (patronising judgements like 'gentle' are invoked); while his disavowal of structuralist theoretical rigour (he dismisses Barthes as a 'fashionable guru') results in a style which is old-fogeyish and complacent, seriously unsophisticated in matters of sexual politics. ... Read more

Product Description
Why did Italo Calvino decide to translate Les Fleurs bleues by Raymond Queneau? Was his translation just a way to pay a tribute to one of his models? This study looks at Calvino's translation from a literary and linguistic perspective: Calvino's I fiori blu is more than a rewriting and a creative translation, as it contributed to a revolution in his own literary language and style. Translating Queneau, Calvino discovered a new fictional voice and explored the potentialities of his native tongue, Italian. In fact Calvino's writings show a visible evolution of poetics and style that occurred rather abruptly in the mid 1960s; this sudden change has long been debated. The radical transformation of his style was affected by several factors: Calvino's new interests in linguistics, in translation theory, and in the act of translation. Translation as Stylistic Evolution analyses several passages in detail and scrutinizes quantitative data obtained by comparing digital versions of the original and Calvino's translation. The results of such assessment of Calvino's text-consistency suggest clear interpretations of the motives behind Calvino's radical and remarkable change of style that are tied to his notion of creative translation. ... Read more