transcript

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KATY CLARK: There's a big birthday celebration taking place in France this weekend. It's the fiftieth anniversary of Le Petit Nicolas. Doesn't sound familiar? Well, it's a popular series of short stories about a little boy -- Nicolas. He's one of France's favorite and most enduring children's characters. Even the diminutive president of France, Nicolas Sarkozy, is sometimes called le Petit Nicolas. Anita Elash has more from Paris.

[Girl speaking in French]

ANITA ELASH: Visitors to this exhibit in Paris about the Petit Nicolas stories are obviously having a good time. They're cracking up at the pranks of this eight-year-old French schoolboy in short pants and a tie. This six-year-old is doubled over looking at an illustration in which Nicolas defies his father by playing the same record over and over again.

[Woman speaking in French]

ELASH: This woman, in her late fifties, loves the puns and the innocent trouble Nicolas gets into with his teachers.

[Woman speaking in French]

ELASH: She says the stories are from a different era, but to her they're timeless and universal. In France, Le Petit Nicolas isn't just a series of children's books. It's considered a literary classic. It's especially loved because Nicolas speaks like a child but mocks the adults with the clarity of a sage. Aymar du Chatenet curate the Paris exhibit.

AYMAR DU CHATENET: The author, Rene Goscinny invented the language of a kid, something that's very hard to do without sounding artificial, and it is an extraordinary form of poetry. Nicholas also has a completely off-the-wall naïve view of his parents. So he undresses the adults. Something as simple as every time mother is upset, she runs to the kitchen to cry.

ELASH: Petit Nicolas' appeal goes far beyond France. He's number one in places like Germany and Turkey. But he's never really caught on in the U.S. Jeff Rider is a professor of romance languages and director of the Wesleyan University study abroad program in Paris. He says he tried reading the books to his own kids.

JEFF RIDER: They fell asleep.

ELASH: Rider says Americans don't get the Petit Nicolas books because so many of the jokes are based on French cultural values. Things like the authoritarian teacher, who Nicolas loves to mock by making faces behind his back.

RIDER: You can have images of people slipping on banana peels and the more dignified the person the funnier that is and I think making faces behind a teacher's back is funnier in France than it is in the United States precisely because the teacher has more authority in the French school system, and so on.

ELASH: Petit Nicolas' birthday celebrations will go on all year in France. The icing on the cake - the first movie based on the stories is coming out this fall. For The World, I'm Anita Elash in Paris.

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