Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

This was the first of Queneau's novels to become a bestseller (in 1959) - for all the wrong reasons. Zazie, who is about 12, is up from the country for the first time, while her mother spends the weekend with her lover. She is to stay with her uncle Gabriel, who is a "danseuse de charme" in a night club, that's to say a big burly man who dresses up in a tutu but strongly denies that he is a homosexual. Provincial Zazie is a great deal more streetwise than many of the Parisians she meets. She says that all she wants to do is travel in the metro - but it's on strike... the book starts with Gabriel meeting her at the Gare d'Austerlitz:

     Howcanaystinksotho, wondered Gabriel, exasperated. Ts incredible, they never clean themselves. It says in the paper that not eleven percent of the flats in Paris have bathrooms, doesn't surprise me, but you can wash without. They can't make much of an effort, this lot around me. On the other  hand, it's not as if they've been specially hand-picked from the dosses of Paris. Zno reason. They're only here by accident. You really can't assume that people who meet people at the Gare d'Austerlitz smell worse than people who meet people at the Gare de Lyon. No really, zno reason. All the same, what a smell.
     Gabriel extirpated a mauve silk handkerchief from his sleeve and dabbed his boko with it.
     "What on earth's that stench?" said a good lady out loud.
     She wasn't thinking about herself when she said that, she wasn't so self-centred, she was referring to the perfume that emanated from the meussieu.
     "That, dearie," replied Gabriel, who was never at a loss when it came to repartee, "is Barbouze, a perfume from the House of Fior."
     "Toughtn't to be allowed, stinking people out like that," continued the old bag, sure of her ground.
     "If I understand you aright, dearie, you imagine that your natural perfume is sweeter than the roses. Well, you're wrong, dearie, you're wrong."
     "Hear that?" said the good lady to a little chap by her side, probably the one legally entitled to mount her. "D'you hear how rude he's being to me, the dirty great pig?"
     The little chap examined Gabriel's dimensions and said to himself he's a Tarzan, but Tarzans are always goodnatured, never take advantage of their strength, that'd be a coward's trick. Cock o' the walk, he screeched:
     "You stink, you gorilla."
     Gabriel sighed. Incitement to violence again. This coercion made him sick. Since the first hominisation it had never stopped. However, what had to be had to be. Wasn't his fault if it was always the weaklings who gave everybody the balls-ache. Still, he'd give the gnat a chance.
     "Say again," says Gabriel.