From my children's book cabinet - Little Nicholas

"Le Petit Nicolas", "Der kleine Nick", "Little Nicholas" ... I don't know how popular he is where you are, but he sure was here in Germany when I was a kid and still is with a lot of people, not few of them people who grew up with him like I did.

Nicolas started out as a comic strip, but he really got popular when he turned up in a short story written by René Goscinny (whose "Asterix" texts were the first Latin class for countless children) and illustrated by Jean-Jacques Sempé (also known for his covers for "The New Yorker") and published in 1959 in the Sunday magazine of the "Sud Ouest" newspaper.
Thanks to the sudden popularity, the comics were published in "Sud Ouest" and later also in "Pilote" until 1965.

The first book wasn't successful until Goscinny and Sempé were invited to a literature program on TV after which they followed up with four more books between 1960 and 1965.
Today "Le Petit Nicolas" is a French classic and not just in France.
The world of Nicolas is not the world today. It wasn't even the world of the time when the books were written. There is no politics, there is no war, there are no big problems.
There is Nicolas and his little world, his parents, his friends, school, and he's telling us about it from his point of view and in the way a child often tells a story, naïve, straightforward, in run-on sentences that sometimes seem a bit breathless (I don't know about the French original, but the German translation warns children not to use the style in school because it doesn't make teachers happy 😉 but I'm afraid this is sometimes the style you see on my blog, now you know why).

In German, he uses the words "prima" or "klasse" a lot which is "chouette" in French and "great" in English, but "prima" for example is not a word I think young people use much anymore and was very much slang of the time. Funny about that is how quickly something can change from "prima" to something that makes him cry and go back to "prima" if it is resolved. 
His train of thoughts can go from a broken store window to the nice store owner and how his mother shops there and buys jam for example, strawberry is best because it doesn't have stones and is "prima". That could be me, to be honest.
Nicolas and his friends live very much in the moment (except when they plan to run away, see down below).

Both Goscinny and Sempé didn't have easy and happy childhoods, for different reasons, and they created Nicolas's childhood like one they couldn't have.
That doesn't mean there's no conflict at all. Nicolas and his friends get into fights a lot and the grownups argue quite a bit as well, within the family or with the neighbors, but as Sempé put it, it was a dream childhood of his - scuffles that didn't hurt and arguments that didn't end in separation.

Anyway, Nicolas's world is mostly that of boys. There are girls, but rarely, and Nicolas is not quite sure about most of them at first, but one story in particular shows that girls are not even always that different which makes him change his mind.

Also, there are of course no modern inventions and toys. There are no computers, no smartphones, but a lot of wild imagination.

Is it merely a nostalgic joy then to read these books, for grownups who idealize and miss their own childhood? No.
There is more to these books ... there are the parents, the teachers, the neighbors, the camp supervisors, the shop owners, etc.
These are the parts that might be enjoyed a lot more by grownups than children because it shows the natural anarchy of children which can drive grownups to despair - the photographer who tries in vain to get the class under control, so he can take a good picture, the camp supervisor who is ready to chuck it in after just one day, the parents who get woken up several times in the early morning because Nicolas got a new watch and is ready to use it for good (making sure his father isn't late for work), the sales clerk in a shop full of fragile items that gets run over by the boys because they want to buy a gift for their teacher.
Of course, the humor is in the exaggeration here, but we may still recognize or remember one or the other incident that could have inspired a similar story.

One of my favorites is the soccer game that starts with the boys playing, but then the fathers "support" them until they have taken over completely and don't even notice that their sons have already taken off to one of the friends' house to watch television there (which not all of them had at the time).

What's timeless about these stories is the friendship and the love. No matter how often one of the boys is threatening to run away because something doesn't go their way and not come home again before they have a lot of money, a car, and a plane, in the end they couldn't be happier about being back at home and get a nice dessert. Dessert is mentioned a lot.

Idealized? Sure. Funny? Definitely. An escape? Yes. But don't we all need a little escape every, now and then to be able to make it through reality? A snicker, a laugh, a bit of relief?

P.S. In 2004, by the way, Goscinny's daughter Anne found unpublished Nicolas stories in the attic which even Sempé hadn't been aware of. Her father had died quite young in 1977, but Sempé was still there and he made drawings for them.
In Germany, the translator of the original books, went to work again although he was already over 80. I know not everyone is happy with his translations, but my school French is not good enough anymore to pass a judgment on that myself. Possibly people don't like the domestication (see more on that topic in my post here), in this case by replacing the French names of people and towns with German ones. I think that was a good call here because the original names were even a bit unusual for France. Except for the very first one, the English translation also replaced the names, by the way.

My personal copies of the books are extra special to me because they have a story of their own, but I'm going to tell you about that in another post.


Sources (mostly in German):

1. "Le petit Nicolas" Original website (in French)
2. Jürgen Ritte im Gespräch mit Frank Meyer: Der große kleine Nick. On: Deutschlandfunk Kultur, March 30, 2009
3. Bettina Kugler: Grosser kleiner Nick. In: Tagblatt, April 20, 2009
4. Volker Weidermann: Fünfzig Jahre "kleiner Nick": Freund fürs Leben. In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, March 29, 2009
5. Torsten Landsberg: Zuflucht in der Kunst - Sempé zum 85. On: DW. Kultur, August, 17, 2018
6. Interview mit Anne Goscinny. On: Weltexpresso - Online-Magazin für Zeitgeschehen, Film, Kunst, Literatur und Musik, December 2, 2022