This is one of those rare cases where the book and the film are both worth the effort. Raymond Queneau spent fourteen years tinkering away at this superficially light and fluffy romp through Paris, and Louis Malle turned it into a wonderful, hilarious film.

Little Zazie comes to Paris to be parked with her uncle Gabriel for 36 hours whilst her mother spends some quality time with a new boyfriend. Zazie's one ambition is to ride on the Métro, but the ticket-punchers are on strike, so she's out of luck.

The storyline is full of eccentric characters, repetitions and bizarre twists of logic, but what Queneau is really trying to do here is to explore the complicated interface between the way people actually talk and the way language is written down on paper. If you're not a native speaker of Parisian French, you may have a hard time decoding the very funny mix of puns, malapropisms, run-together words, dialect, and good old-fashioned swearing. You're unlikely to find bloudjinnzes in your dictionary, but it's always more fun when the penny doesn't drop until a line or two later. Reading the line aloud often helps.

The current Gallimard edition comes with a couple of "out-takes" from early drafts of the novel, completing the confusion between the book and the DVD... ( )

A sweet, funny, sometimes bawdy story of little Zazie visiting her family in Paris, wanting to ride the metro for the first time. ( )