Zazie dans le métro . . . dans le métro

Today, I finished reading this book:

It was more challenging than I expected, because Raymond Queneau uses all kinds of quasi-phonetic spellings that reflect the way people speak, rather than the way the Academie Française wants speech to sound like. Examples from the first three pages:

• Doukipudonktan (first word in the book, its official spelling is "d'où qui pue donc tant" and means "where's that terrible smell coming from"); 
• ptite/ptit ("petite/petit")
• Skeutadittaleur ("ce que tu as dit toute à l'heure", "what you just said")
• vlà ("voilà")
• Chsuis ("je suis" - I remember wondering why kids in my sophomore-year French class had come back from a trip to France saying this)
• Çui-là ("celui-là")

You get the idea. At times I actually had to say words out loud a few times to figure out what the spelling was supposed to indicate. Also there's tons of slang, colloquial phrases, and stylistic characteristics that clearly exist to confuse non-native speakers. So like I said, challenging. But also incredibly entertaining - it's the story of a young girl (Zazie) from some French province who is left with her uncle in Paris for two days so her mom can shack up with some guy. Zazie is spunky, to say the least, and desperately wants to see the métro. Unfortunately there's a strike, so she has to find other ways of seeing the city, most of which include evading her uncle and running into a host of unsavory characters. In 1960, Louis Malle made a movie out of the story, which was Queneau's first big success.

I mostly read the book in the métro, congratulating myself often on reading Zazie in the métro in the appropriate place. But it turns out Zazie never spends any significant time in the métro - oops. Luckily there were plenty of hilarious hijinx to keep me entertained no matter where I was reading. Example: During a fight scene , we read, "Zazie, de nouveau, dormait. Laverdure, sans doute dans un esprit de vengeance, essayait de projeter un excrément frais hors de sa cage." ("Zazie was sleeping again. Laverdure [a parrot], no doubt in a vengeful spirit, tried to eject fresh poop from his cage.")

I really enjoyed this book, and I think you would too. But you don't have to take my word for it . . .