Word: queneau
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Parisian Pollyanna. A national institution since she burst on the Seine in a 1959 bestselling novel, Zazie has become almost as influential as Colette's Gigi at the height of La Belle Epoque. Critics have compared Zazie's creator-Raymond Queneau, a distinguished poet and chief reader at the Gallimard publishing house-to Flaubert, Stendhal, Hugo and Hegel. (One angry dissenter: Nobel Prize Laureate François Mauriac...
...reasons for Zazie's serious appeal to critics are complex. For one thing, Author Queneau, a onetime surrealist deeply concerned with language, tries to close the gap between literary and spoken speech in the Zazie novel, runs words together and sometimes employs phonetic spellings. Others see in Zazie a device of savage social satire. Says New Wave Movie Director Louis (Les Amants) Malle: "She's actually the angel come to announce the destruction of Babylon." Still others have compared her to everyone from Joan of Arc (defending popular virtues against monarchists with Napoleonic delusions) to Lolita. In fact...