Product Description
"[This collection] displays Vian's range from gallows humor to verbal fireworks, and happily serves to give visibility to this important writer."- Publishers Weekly. "Ultimately, Blues for a Black Cat is a collection of moral fables, albeit fables told in a cynical, mocking voice and set in a skewed version of the real world. Under the surface absurdity and verbal play, they offer serious indictments of human weakness and pretensions. Further, they reveal the spiritual emptiness just beneath our civilized facade. Vian's blues are not only for a black cat, but for a society without meaning."- Manoa. "[Blues for a Black Cat] brings back the nimble Vian in a collection of his short fiction, initially published as Les Fourmis in 1949. The work has the unmistakable flavor of the time and place, Claude Abadie's jazz band, the coded and absurdist messages of rebellion, the wistful fables, verbal riffs and goofy anarchic encounters; the mise-en-scene includes an expiring jazzman who sells his sweat, a cat with a British accent and a piano that mixes a cocktail when "Mood Indigo" is played."-Boston Globe.Boris Vian (1920-59), a trained engineer and jazz trumpet player, was a major literary figure in World War II France. Julia Older is the author or editor of many works. Her stories, translations, and poems have appeared in New Directions, the New Yorker, and many other journals. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Literary rarity
In Blues for a black cat, Boris Vian's literary genius shines with rare intensity impossible to find in modern works. While I read a few of Vian's works in the past, revisiting this book was the perfect escape from the mundane world of today's literature. Without getting into any plot or revealing too much about this compilation of short stories, Blues for a black cat, is an insane, entertaining, humorous, profound, powerful avant-garde literary rarity. Vian's style remains unique decades after the original publication, and while seemingly incoherent on the surface, it is intentionally so. Vian plays with words and objects, breathing life into them, making them take on a life vastly different from what we are used to, changing directions and staying on track at the same time, and inserting a deep incision in to our consciousness. Through humor, Vian touches upon uneasy topics -- shallow interpersonal communications, lack of spirituality, empty lives... and above all, our humanity. Humanity, with its faults, seems to be a common thread throughout Vian's works (at least those I had the chance to read). The list of subjects in this book will be too long, but one story will forever remain, in my opinion, one of the best short stories written about WWII (or any war for that matter) -- Pins and Needles.
As Vian himself says: "Routine dulls impressions." Readers be assured, there is nothing dull about his writing. His prose is full of gems, his ramblings are amusing, his literary rebellion is unrepeated by the generations of writers that came after him. While not pure surrealism, his approach to reality, to make the most mundane breathe with a new life, is fascinating.
Julia Older's excellent translation finally brings this important piece to the English speaking audiences.
Blues for a black cat would be a great sample of Vian's work for those not familiar with this author.
... Read more

Product Description
Published in Paris in 1946 as a hardboiled thriller loaded with sex and blood, allegedly censored in the US and "translated" into French--I Spit On Your Graves was both a pure mystification and direct home to American literature and movies. More deeply, it was a violent attack on racism by a jazz fan who had already befriended many black musicians and was to become the closest French friend of Ellington, Davis, and Parker. Find out why this young author outstripped sales of Malraux, Camus, Sartre, and de Beauvoir when it appeared in France...and continues to scandalize today. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (10)

Very good book, but HORRIBLY edited
There are at least two mistakes on every page. These include mistakes with quotation marks, dashes, missing words and paragraph formatting. Find a different edition.

Revenge...plain and simple...
Im going to spare you all the pretense that this is a great book for its structure, narrative, theme, subtext, etc (the usual literature hype) its a classic book about a classic topic, REVENGE. A black man who can pass as white performs the horrid to correct the wrongs he has been dealt (and his brother). If you wanna read a psychological thriller then read this. The nay sayers seem to be under the assumption that there are more realistic books written about the topic or perhaps they themselves have published something better and see fit to rate it so poorly.

Great satire disguised as social commentary disguised as gritty pulp noir
When Jean d' Halluin first published I Spit On Your Graves in 1946, he was looking for a bestseller to kickstart his new imprint, Editions du Scorpion. Written by an African-American writer named Vernon Sullivan, the book was a visceral, often misogynistic, and (once it gets rolling) violent pulp novel offering a gritty commentary on racial injustice in the United States.

The plot centered on Lee Anderson, a light skinned black man seeking revenge for the murder of his brother at the hands of whites. Anderson, takes his revenge by infiltrating southern society as a white man (he has light skin and blond hair), bedding every white woman he can, and ultimately selecting two of those women to murder as payback for his brother's death. Despite being considered too controversial and subversive for U.S. publishers, the French public devoured the novel. By 1947, it outsold work by Sartre and Camus, giving d' Halluin the bestseller he craved.

That alone would've made for interesting literary history. But there was more to the story...

Vernon Sullivan never tried to have the book published in the United States.

Vernon Sullivan did not exist. I Spit On Your Graves was in fact written by a Frenchman. A white Frenchman. Said Frenchman had never actually visited the United States.

Then there was the law suit filed against the author by Cartel d'action sociale et morale, the same right wing organization that tried to censor the work of Henry Miller.

Last but not least, there was the grisly murder committed by a Parisian man who strangled his mistress. The authorities discovered a copy of I Spit On Your Graves at the scene of the crime with a part where Lee Anderson dispatches one of his victims circled.

Hence its bestseller status. Who didn't want to read the "murder book," as the introduction Marc Lapprand calls it?

And then of course, there was the bigger question: what if the book was not about racial injustice at all?

On the surface, I Spit On Your Graves is a pulpy, not expertly written tale of murder and sex. And upon first reading, I Spit On Your Graves comes across as that - a cheap pulp mystery, lacking only the cover illustration of a woman screaming, hands raised against her face, as an unseen stalker comes at her with a knife.

It is overflowing with graphic sex (for it's time) where Lee takes the female characters in every scenario imaginable (barring midgets and donkeys). At first one would take it as a sub-par Tropic of Cancer, except that the reader's knowledge of Lee's racial identity gives the book a taboo that is non-existent in Miller's novels. Lee gets his hands on every white woman he possibly can, and they are all to willing to be taken, even if they don't admit it at first (as is the case with Lou Asquith). As Lee relates early on in the story, "I had all the girls, one after the other, but it was a bit too easy, it turned my stomach." It comes off like a line from a 70s Blaxploitation film. And in many ways, I Spit On Your Graves reads like a Blaxploitation script. However, as the book goes on Lee flips from bragging of his conquests to being disgusted at how far he has sunk to achieve his revenge. He becomes increasingly sickened by his seduction of the Asquith girls and this drives him further towards the violent outcome.

And that is where the book starts to turn from pure pulp sadism and gratuitous sex into a more layered, psychological exploration.We know Lee is seeking revenge. We know he is going to kill. It is only a matter of time and the reader is forced to travel down the road, dragged further and further into Lee's madness, strapped in, unable to change the course.

Keep in mind, Vian was no pulp writer. He was a contemporary of Sartre and Camus, who wrote the incredibly well received Froth on the Daydream (also translated as Foam of the Daze). He was also a translator, poet, music, critic, and jazz musician who was close with Duke Ellington and Miles Davis.

In many ways, it is similar to Brett Easton Ellis' American Psycho, forcing you to see the world of the book through the eyes of a very twisted and violent narrator. We immediately find ourselves repulsed by the narrator's narcissism, their ruthlessness, and most importantly their penchant for extremely grisly acts. And yet, it is this grotesque, amped, psychotic, bloodthirsty humanity that captivates us.

I'm not the first person to make such a comparison between these two books. However, there is a major difference between them. Whereas Ellis was satirizing society, specifically the Reagan-worshipping stockbrokers of the 80s, Vian was going deeper - he was satirizing publishing and ultimately, the reader.

After all, sex and murder were rampant in novels published circa 1946. Both are still widely used as devices and plot points today. In fact, one could argue that both are necessary lynchpins of all modern literature. Sex and death is what it's all about.

The book is so overly violent and misogynist because Vian is parodying pulp writing, a form very prevalent in post-war France when he wroteI Spit On Your Graves. Like Swift's A Modest Proposal, it takes the argument to its fullest extreme, giving readers the ultimate in literary-noir: a story so extremely violent and disgusting to modern thinking that the reader can't put it down.

Much has been said about the social commentary perceived within I Spit On Your Graves. Of this one can look literally. Lee, a black man who's brother was murdered by whites, seeks revenge by wreaking havoc on white society. In the end however, without giving anything away, there is no justice for Lee. So it is easy to see I Spit On Your Graves as a biting commentary on racial injustice in America during the 20th Century.

But in many ways, Vian is still having his fun with us. After all, he's not trying to convince us that Lee is an unfortunate character of racial injustice that we should pity. He's getting us to hate Lee Anderson in spite of his quest for justice. After all, Vian's audience was white, educated, French society. And it is Lee's racial identity, his status as `black' that made (and still makes the book) so controversial. If Lee was a white man bedding a bunch of women and then murdering two of them, it would be a Harry Crews novel. Vian however spins the tables, serving up a tale of a violent, lustful black man out for revenge, one that horrifies and yet draws us in, convincing a repulsed and outraged public to keep on reading. Ultimately the joke is on us. We are thinking of racial injustice, clinging to the social message seemingly contained within the book, and yet it is the titillating bits - the sex and death - that keep us reading. Swift would've been proud.

Uncomfortable book not helped by flawed printing
There isn't a whole lot to say about this book that hasn't been mentioned in previous reviews:It's about a black man who looks/poses as white to infiltrate a white town and avenge his brother by embarassing and killing two aristo-white girls.

The novel follows his narration from entering the town to socializing with the locals and preparing his revenge.I was surprised that I was not shocked, disturbed or offended by any of the content in this book, though I can certainly see how it would affect people the way that it did, particularly in the time when it was published.Vian, a staunch supporter of African American culture, as well as an acerbic cynic, was a huge fan of taking this sort of material and rubbing *Our* noses in it.

However, at this point I would dare say that the book is only mildly disarming and that anyone who has ever read anything by hardboiled authors such as (aforementioned) Jim Thompson, or Paul Cain, or beat poets like Bukowski, should not be offended by the text - at least on the surface.The language is simple and concise.The sex scenes included are just shy of explicit and the violence scarcely described.

The most frightening ingredient of the book is of course the implication it makes regarding racism and tolerance in American culture.The disgust towards black people indicated in the text is particularly raw.However, it is interesting to note at this point in the review that Vian had never set foot in America.Like Kafka and (now) von Trier, his perception of the American mindset is thusly a little skewed.

The borderline material in the book is incredibly ruined due to embarassingly poor editing, specifically in the formatting department.There are several simple grammatical errors involving quotation marks and the like, but the most glaring problems are present in line breaks and new paragraphs in the middle of a given sentence.These issues come to surface in the later half of the book and I found rather tedious.This sort of sloppy editting is inexcusable, particularly with something so simple.

A Real Oddment for Aficionados of the Hardboiled
If you've read James M. Cain and David Goodis and Jim Thompson and Charles Williford and like the dark, tough-as-nails paperback original fiction of the forties and fifties, pick this up.It's a postwar Frenchman's take on the dark underside of America, a place he'd never been-- so his imaginary America is even more corrupt than the stuff the Americans were writing.It's sleazy "realism" (that is: fantasy), with all the teenaged girls panting nymphos and all the men racist pigs.The jargon is just "off" enough to raise a smile (though the translation is probably fine-- I read it in English), and the behavior of our "hero"-- a black man passing as white named Lee-- is completely reprehensible.He hates _everybody_.Due to the odd nature of its authorship and its aspirations, this is an entertaining read: not necessarily a good novel, but an intriguing and entertaining one. ... Read more

Product Description
L'Ecume des jours (Foam of the Daze) is a jazz fueled Science Fiction story that is both romantic and nihilistic! Vian's novel is an assortment of bittersweet romance, absurdity and the frailty of life. Foam of the Daze is a nimble-fingered masterpiece that is both witty and incredibly moving. It is a story of a wealthy young man Colin and the love of his life Chloe, who develops a water lily in her lung.The supporting cast includes Chick, an obsessive collector of noted philosopher Jean-Sol Partre's books and stained pants, and Nicolas who is a combination of P.G. Wodehouse's fictional butler Jeeves and the Green Hornet's Kato. The soul of the book is about the nature of life disappearing and loving things intensely as if one was making love on a live grenade! ... Read more

Customer Reviews (5)

A little known classic of 20th century fiction
I read the Boris Vian book when I was a college student. It was one of the most beautifully written books of modern fiction.It was right up there with Kafka, Proust, Bieliy, and Mayerink. Now I purchased it for my son. Read it for its poetry of language.

The best French Novel of the 2oth century for me
I read this so many times - it's a jewel of imagination, beauty and originality.A modern classic.

Great book, poor translation
Beside this English translation I have read two other editions of this book (one in its original language -French- and another in a language other than English). I have to say that, by comparison, this one kinda dissapointed me. A lot of expressions and meanings were lost in the poor translation, some were downright stupid mistakes. "Foam of the Daze"?!? I wonder if this book was typed by dictation, since the correct translation would be "Foam of the Days". It reminded me of the typing on the TV's CC system, or listening to one of Beethoven's symphonies with a quasi-deaf conductor leading the orchestra.
In my opinion, it takes someone with writing talent and command of both languages to translate superior literature like this and retain its original greatness. Yes, the story is very moving, but when it comes to writers like Boris Vian there's much more than a story to it.
As a customer mentioned already, Stanley Chapman's 1967 translation - "Froth on the Daydream" - is the best one to look for, by far superior to this one.

WOW
I will put it in a simple way: I have read and re-read this book in French, in Spanish and now in English more than fifty times and still find it to be the best love story ever told. Vian characters are straight, pure, honest and passionate in a way that we only can dream about. They are so full of life that you can actually cry when they die (I know, sound commonplace, but how often do you really mourn a character?). Vian draws this paradox of life and death better than anyone I know. Oh, you may wonder why I've read this book so many times... well, you know, Vian is actually telling you a different story every time you lay eyes into this book of marvels. Another commonplace would be to say that your life will change dramatically after reading this book. Ok, don't take my word, just go for it yourself. And, if you can, share your thoughts...

Review from the Los Angeles Times (Feb 1, 2004)
A legend throughout Europe - French musician, translator of Raymond Chandler and seminal science fiction writer, poet, songwriter, novelist and screen actor - Boris Vian remains little known in the United States. Los Angeles-based TamTam Book aims to correct this, having published a paperback edition of Vian's landmark thriller "I Spit on Your Graves" in 2001 and now a new translation of his masterful "Foam of the Daze" (L'Ecume des jours"), with the first translation of "L'Automne à Pékin" to follow.

There have been two previous English translations of "Foam": Stanley Chapman's 1967 British edition, "Froth on the Daydream," and Jon Sturrock's U.S. version, "Mood Indigo," which appeared shortly thereafter. Chapman's is by far the superior, admirably transposing Vian's rhythms into English and finding equivalents for his multi-level puns and wordplay. But Brian Harper's hip new translation, edged toward the modern U.S. reader, may well become the standard.

This is a great novel, mind you. Though on its surface, the simplest of stories - Vian summed it up as "a man loves a woman, she falls ill, she dies" - beneath are a host of ambiguities, digressions, levels of meaning. Not quite beneath actually, for subtexts keep erupting to the surface. It is in many ways a novel built of eruptions.

Simply, then, this is a tale of two couples: Colin, a rich and rather superfluous man, and Chloe, a woman dying from a lily growing in her lung; Chick, whose life is ruined by his collecting of Jean-Sol Partre's books and memorabilia, and Alise, who tries to save Chick from himself by murdering Partre. As the lily grows in Chloe's lung, Colin does all he can to keep her alive. But her bed sinks closer to the ground and the room grows ever smaller. Because Colin has no money left to pay for burial, Chloe's coffin is simply thrown out the window.

In Vian's world, nothing is simple, nothing may be taken for granted. Because people they love have died, mice persuade diffident cats to kill them; bells detach themselves from doors to come and announce visitors; neckties rebel against being knotted; some broken windowpanes grow back overnight while others darken from breathing difficulties; a piano mixes cocktails to match the music being played upon it; armchairs and sausages must be calmed before use. When Colin puts Duke Ellington's "The Mood to Be Wooed" on the phonograph, the O's on the record label cause the corners of the room to become round.

In Vian's books, the world becomes ineluctably strange, the world as a child or a madman might see it. And that's the recipe for "Foam of the Daze," a novel with paradox at its heart, as critic David Meakin has observed: one part light-hearted fantasy, one part tragedy. Add wordplay and romance to taste. Your heart will be broken. You will be confused and confounded. You will laugh aloud. And at least for a time, however hard you try, your own world will refuse to be what you think it is.

Here is Colin in church after Chloe's death:
"Why did you have her die?" asked Colin.
Oh... said Jesus, drop the subject.
He looked for a more comfortable position on his nails.
She was so sweet, said Colin. Never was she bad, neither in thought, nor in action.
That has nothing to do with religion, mumbled Jesus, yawning. He shook his head a little to change the slant of his crown of thorns.
I don't see what we've done, said Colin, we don't deserve this.

He lowered his eyes... Jesus's chest was rising softly and regularly, his features breathed calm, his eyes had closed and Colin could hear a light purr of satisfaction coming from his nostrils, like a sated cat."

Vian died June 23, 1959, at 39 as he sat watching a film version of his thriller "I Spit on Your Graves." He'd neglected to take his heart medications that morning and as the first frames ticked by on screen, he is said to have uttered, "These guys are supposed to be American? My ass!" and collapsed.

Vian's was a short, very full, very strange ride, like that of his ever-youthful characters in "Foam of the Daze."

James Sallis, Los Angeles Times Book Review (Sunday, February 1, 2004). ... Read more

Customer Reviews (19)

Une histoire triste
This brilliant work of fiction, akin to a fairy-tale, combines science-fiction, surrealism, absurdism, lyricism...
One of the highlights of post-war French litterature, it has becomesomewhat of a cult favourite for teenagers, as it relates the lives of yound adults who refuse to accept the responsabilities of adulthood, preferring to live according to principles eerily similar to those held by hippies, refusing to temper idealism with the demands of reality.

A fresh and poignant tale
It is a pity that Boris Vian has no name recognition in the anglo-saxon world. Much to blame is probably the uniqueness of his language and unconventional writing approach. This refreshing tale encompasses youth, love and the fleeting aspect of all that is precious in life.

Exquis, magnifique, superbe verbe et texture
Ce livre est un chef-d'oeuvre que l'on déguste du début à la fin et que l'on apprécie de plus en plus à chaque relecture. J'adore Boris Vian et l'aurait marié sans même y penser après avoir lu ce qui coule de sa plume. Les mondes qu'il crée sont fascinants, et celui-ci est le plus beau de tous.

Exquis, magnifique, superbe verbe et texture
Ce livre est un chef-d'oeuvre que l'on déguste du début à la fin et que l'on apprécie de plus en plus à chaque relecture. J'adore Boris Vian et l'aurait marié sans même y penser après avoir lu ce qui coule de sa plume. Les mondes qu'il crée sont fascinants, et celui-ci est le plus beau de tous.

searing, unmissable love story
L'Ecume des Jours (or, John Sturrock's translation, Foam of the days) tells us a story of Colin and Chloé and their love.
Of love that - however pure, serene and (perhaps) unbelievable it may appear to our everyday eye - is very much innocent. Like the one that, at least some of us, have always wished to experience.
The whole story has, unfortunatelly, a tragical end. But then, it wouldn't be one of the nicest books I have ever read. Only to express myself better through similarity, it is Jamiroquai's "Falling" that makes me think of Collin's falling in love with Chloé - except that Collin's love is 'returned' - they both love each other dearly and very much.
The whole story is divided in two parts - two worlds where love stays the same (even grows!) only the encompassing world undergo (terrible) changes. It's the careless world of Colin's and Chloe's love before they get married, full of warmness that only two suns may produce, and of the world after their wedding. The moment they say final yes at their wedding, Chloe gets ill and the whole preceding atmosphere suddenly changes from "happy" to "gloomy." As I said, the love stays, even gets greater, but the whole story then leads to an inevitable tragical end...
In Vian's own words it's a history that is "...entirely true as I made it up from the beginning to the very end." ["...entierement vraie, puisque je l'ai imaginée d'un bout a l'autre"] I would not quite say it is wholly made up although it's only my opinion. Yes, the story is a bit unreal, perhaps exaggerated, but I think it needs to be in order to let us feel and (hopefully) realize, that as 'panta rei' (as Time flows by) we should pauper our friendships and, when being loved and loving ourselves, then we should love sincerely and happily. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (8)

J'adore this book!
I am so glad I discovered this author and this book!I found Vian's flippant and humorous treatment of such serious things in life as a mother's stifling love, shame, depravity and religion all the more effective in showing up mans cruelty.To me, this book was like reading Salvador Dali; teasing symbolism, tantalizing imagery in deep and true colors.Someone wrote here that Vian is a typical French author who doesn't serve up pearls already shucked for you; you have to dive for them yourself.I agree.I also agree that this is more of a literary achievement then an intellectual one but I believe that is only because Vian is having fun with his contemporary writing friends such as Sartre.Anyway, this is one of those books you mustn't work too hard on; just relax and let the story unfold.I think you will find it is a story that continues to reveal itself to you long after you turn that last page.

A highwayscribery "Book Report"


In "Heartsnatcher," Boris Vian put the Western world on the couch for an examination and decided the best solution was to hide from it.

Like many writers, Vian had no particular claim to the title of social psychoanalyst other than the frequent contemplation of his navel, which he found time to do in between stints as an actor, jazz trumpeter, engineer and mechanic.

This French scribe, of little import beyond his native nation's borders, was part of a post-World War II Parisian ebullience springing from the magical city's Latin Quarter.

A practitioner of le swing in a band that included two of his brothers, Vian played host to such jazz luminaries as Miles Davis, Duke Ellington, and Charlie Parker.

He was part of a hedonistic crosscurrent in the Saint German-des-Pres world upon which politically committed intellectuals like Jean Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, and Andre Malraux had put their own stamp.

The two groups clashed frequently. The serious crowd probably had a more lasting impact, and the hedonistic crowd more fun, which is pretty much how things work.

In his introduction to the Dalkey Archive Press edition of "Heartsnatcher," John Sturrock writes, that Vian's 1950 play L'Equarissage pour Tous, "a spoof of the Normandy invasion in World War II, was vilified as 'shameful spittle' by Elsa Triolet, wife of Louis Aragon, the French poet, journalist, and staunch member of the French Communist Party. Jean Cocteau, already disliked by the communists, came to Vian's defense and compared the play's spirit to that of his own Les Maries de la Tour Eiffel."

Anyway, the novel appears to be part of mid-century Western lit's larger effort to break with traditional storytelling modes.

In her introductory essay to Jack Kerouac's "On the Road: The Original Scroll," Penny Vlagopoulos noted, that, "Like the European avant-garde artists of the preceding decades, Kerouac sought to collapse the distance between life and art."

Although a contemporary of Kerouac's, Vian's novel would suggest he was up to the same tricks with a focus on the interior life, rather than topographically focused screeds of the Beat poet.

"Heartsnatcher" is refreshing in that the story takes turns not normally associated with the paces of traditional storytelling, even if that means the payoff comes with less clarity and satisfaction.

In fact, it is a little hard to tell what is truly going on in "Heartsnatcher," which hails from a great French tradition that obligates you to work the brain instead of serving up its pearls on a freshly shucked oyster.

The story, such as it is, opens up with the main character, the psychiatrist Timortis, delivering triplets to a rather complex lady named Clementine, who has barred her husband Angel from the momentous event and, eventually, from her life.

"She preferred," Vian tells us, "to suffer and scream alone because she hated her swollen belly and wanted nobody to see her in that condition."

In a conversation with Angel, we learn Timortis comes from the outside with a plan to psychoanalyze the members of Clementine's household on a cliff above the sea and fill his own "empty vessel," in a firm nod to the Mr. Freud, with the subconscious detritus of residents from the nearby, unnamed village.

Timortis tells Angel he wants to learn the villager's "most terrible, heart-rending secrets, his hidden ambitions and desires; the things he does not even admit to himself; everything; everything - and then everything that lies beyond that everything."

The village turns out to be the great scummy id of humanity itself; complete with an "Old Folks Fair" that peddles Golden-agers as cheap labor, requiring men to display what Cervantes called, "the meats" as part of the bidding process, while treating broken crones no better than burros.

Shocked, Timortis questions the "Knacketeer" running this travesty about the woeful lack of scruples and gets a punch in the mouth for his troubles.

Later, he witnesses the brutes of the burg literally crucify a stallion for its sin of copulating with a mare. The narrative is peppered throughout with the deaths of wan little boy apprentices driven until they drop.

A "scarlet stream" filled with indescribable mucks and mires runs near Clementine's house and through the village. Along the waterway works a man in a barge named "Glory Hallelujah," who retrieves dead and decrepit things from the bottoms with his teeth, as required by an agreement with the villagers who pay him in gold, but forbid him to spend it.

"They pay me to feel their remorse for them," explains Glory Halleluhah.

There is a local Vicar whom holds his flock in the highest disdain and will not petition God that their fields be watered with rain until threatened with violence.

His religion is different than the one his followers practice. "Come on Sunday," he tells Timortis, " and you'll see...You'll see how I attack there materialism with an even more materialistic materialism. I'll rub the noses of the brutes in their own messes. Their apathy will find itself striking against an even greater apathy...and a worrying anxiety will grow from this collision which will land them back to religion...the religion of luxury."

Such luxury includes bread and circuses pitting the vicar and his curate in brutal fistfights given for a little local excitement.

Up at the house on the hill Clementine stores a rancid piece of meat in a drawer and eats a piece everyday as way of drawing the dangers of the world away from her triplets and toward her.

Isolated, sexually deprived yet inflamed, she works her mind into feverish fits, inventorying the many dangers from which she must protect them the little boys.

Her task grows even more difficult when they learn how to fly so that the compound is progressively walled in, pruned of all tree coverage, and ultimately outfitted with cushy cages of ready pleasure into which the little scamps are locked for their own safety.

And there's your story. One understood by those who opt for the ivory tower or have set out in youth to make the word a better place.

It does not tell us everything about Vian. As a matter of fact it is a later work from a short life and considered an attempt by him to generate "serious" literature.

Yet while his flights and fancy and non sequitir grotesqueries may try a reader's ability to maintain suspension of disbelief, the prose often graze the body poetic - a statement which obligates the scribe to go dig out an example...

....Here we go, right from the second paragraph of the book, "Timortis sauntered along, looking at the deep bloodred centers of the calamines throbbing in the flat sunshine. At each beat a cloud of pollen rose and, soon afterwards, settled on the dreamily trembling leaves. The bees had all disappeared on holiday."

His greatest success came with, "I'll Spit on Your Graves," an American noir detective send-up, which he wrote in two weeks, under a pseudonym, for handsome royalties and a prosecution for perversion.

Ah success!

"Boris Vian
has been caught
in the cogs
of the machinery of the laws
constructed by his fellow men
and has appeared
before their practitioners
because he wrote
'I'll Go Spit On Your Graves'
under the name of
Vernon Sullivan
although even that's
far from being the whole story"

Which is part of a poem about Vian by Raymond Queneau, about that particular and unpleasant episode.

The future Socialist President of France, Francois Mitterand, served as his attorney, and after a lot of unnecessary grief, Vian got a slap on the wrist.

The book literally killed him. Watching a movie version in the theater that he disapproved of, Vian stood up to publicly air his gripes and keeled over dead.

Sort of. For writers reach beyond their own times; often successfully.

Writes Sturrock: "He became the hero of youth following his death in 1959. And of course when May 1968 arrived, with its benign if hopeless insistence that imagination take power in France, Vian did better still, he was the very prophet the gallantly fantasizing students needed."

Looking to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the May '68 uprisings in Paris, highwayscribery chose to remember Vian in a way that links the literature and politics of that tremendous moment.

Actually, more like 4minus
August 30, 2009-In reexamining this early review, it now seems I let my enthusiasm for the unusual aspects of this novel get out of hand. While I still think it is an interesting, if morbid, book, I now think 5 stars should be reserved for something more timeless or exceptional. It seems likely the characters and events of the novel may be very subjective symbolic representations of episodes of the author's life.The depiction of life in a rustic village exposes through its bizarre customs the latent perversity and cruelty in human society. Common decency and kindness seem to be completely absent. In the church, sermons become violent. The vicar takes shelter behind a defensively constructed pulpit while the congregation hurls stones his way. Separated from the village is a house on a cliff where domestic relations, ruled by unparalleled phobias and anxieties, become an extravaganza of absurdity. A psychiatrist tries to make himself whole by psycho-analyzing others. The style of writing is a counterpart to certain surrealist paintings of vivid hues and photographic clarity of seemingly familiar landscapes into which have intruded alien, enigmatic and menacing images. These extreme word-pictures are like poetry that compels us to thinkabout things we take for granted from a different perspective. Some of this imagery I found disturbing. There is humor here, but it seems dark and sardonic. There is a lot of clever wordplay which must have given the translator quite a challenge. It is a book of ideas presented not in an intellectual style but represented artistically in the surrealist manner. I recommend it for those who like to explore unique forms of expression, but must say that before I had finished it I had begun to feel oppressed by its picture of human obsessiveness and was glad I could escape from that weird world simply by closing the book.

A strange man comes to a weird town...
*Heartsnatcher* is an uncategorizable novel--a sort of semi-surrealistic fable ((what fable isn't at least semi-surrealistic?)) written in a playful and poetic style that nonetheless delivers a powerful--if elusive--"moral." It begins when a traveling psychiatrist named Timortis stops at an obscure rural hamlet to lend assistance to a woman very painfully giving birth to triplets. As fate will have it, he'll never leave.

Located far from the city, seemingly existing in a time and world all its own, the town Timortis has stumbled upon in his search for someone to analyze is populated by a community of eccentrics and regulated according to customs that range from the comic to the bizarre to the flat-out grotesque. Timortis, as an outsider, as well as a student of human nature ((he suffers from a dispiriting inner emptiness)), can do little more than observe, adapt, and, eventually, "go native"--that is, if he doesn't do what seems to be the sensible thing: to leave.

Instead Timortis accepts an invitation to stay on at the home of the new parents of little Noel, Joel, and Alfa Romeo. Thus Timortis becomes entangled in a tragic-comic Oedipal drama carried beyond the point of absurdity: Mom, experiencing a profound post-partum disgust with the husband who brought motherhood upon her with his filthy lust, nevertheless broods obsessively over the safety of her little brood; Dad, well-meaning but unwanted, banished from bed and breast, bitterly embraces his lonely fate; and the three little cherubs themselves--by turns mischievous, magical, and innocently cruel--living in the enchanted world of a childhood that must ultimately come to an end...but not if Mom can help it.

*Heartsnatcher*--rather inaptly titled--is a charming, quirky, surprising novel full of life, imagination, and a dreamy wisdom that imparts itself effortlessly to the reader. It's a serious book that never takes itself too seriously--fun, funny, and philosophical all at the same time--a book that strikes me as impossible to dislike and all-too-likely to work its spell on you from page one.

An Allegory of Protection unto Death
This allegory of good, bad and over-concern is narrated by a psychiatrist named Timortis (Timor Mortis) who comes upon this unknown village in an unknown country in an unknown time.Somethings in the village are familiar but many are not and assumptions have to be made as to who is what and what is who.Timortis enters a house in the village in which a woman is about to give birth (she has three sons: a set of twins named Joel and Noel and a single named Alfa Romeo).He ends up staying with the family for years (maybe eight, it hard to say) but only psychoanalyses the nanny who thinks the word is a euphemism for sex.

There are odd going ons in the town such as an "Old People's Market" and a church at which the Priest has a curate who is a devil and they battle for the amusement of the villagers.But all this is an afterthought to the trials and tribulations of the mother, whose only thoughts are how to protect her children from everyday problems that escalate up to how to protect them from meteorites.

The book is a study of the ends to which love can drive people and how love cannot only be stifling, it can be downright dangerous. ... Read more

Product Description
Rizzoli is pleased to present the first English-language translation of Manual of St-Germain-des-Près by beloved French author Boris Vian. Paris in the fifties was an incredible place and time: with the end of the war, everything seemed possible. Vian's book, a guided tour of the left bank cafés, galleries, underground jazz clubs, theaters, and apartment salons captures the transformative culture of the existentialist and post-surrealistic circles. The list of luminaries he ran with includes Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus, Jean Cocteau, Jean Genet, Alberto Giacometti, Juliette Greco, Raymond Queneau, Jacquês Prevert, Miles Davis, and, of course, Jean-Paul Sartre. Manual of St-Germain-des-Près is a chronicle of a period, a place, a circle, and a lifestyle, highlighted in this volume with sumptuous photographs by Georges Dudognon that illustrate Vian's words. A broader cultural context for Vian's work is provided in theintroduction. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (5)

Boris Vian's Manual of St. Germain des Pres
1st class service all the way. Thanks.

Groovin' in St Germain
Capturing the verve, vitality and creativity of St Germain at it's richest peak, this book seduces, subjects and forces one to submit to all that St Germain was in its artistic heydey!Take me back, take me back!!!

beutiful
the book has a very unique design and a lot of nice photos, while the content is absolutely magnificent.
i bought it as a present along with the Duke Elington masterpieces box set since Vian was inspired by Indigo Mood while writing his masterpiece Foam of the Day.
I am thinking to order another copy of the book for myself.

History as it happened
There is coverage of Paris in the 1890's, and Paris in the 1920's, but coverage of the 40's and 50's, the era of the existentialists, is pretty sparse.To the media, existentialists meant both real philosophers, like Sartre and Camus, and, to make lurid copy, anyone who hung out in the infamous jazz and poetry cellar-clubs of St. Germain.Vian's book, however, is devoid of media-hype.It is, as the editor says, "a snapshot of history as it happens."
I happened to be there for some of it, like hanging at the Cafe de Flore that Sartre and de Beauvoir had established as the current literary scene; while across the street at Le Lipp I found a vestige of an older one: a dude who was still a surrealist.And I hung at Chez Inez, with jazz musicians and ex-pats from Harlem, a club owned by a zanzy black American woman; and at bars with people like Orson Welles' ex-girlfriend, and Juliette Grecko, who played in Cocteau's Orpheus and claimed she almost married Miles Davis.
For me, too naive to realize it, it was a time like none other.Fortunately, Boris Vian nailed it down.

Curious and delightful artifact of postwar bohemian Paris
A silly, very tongue-in-cheek user's guide and hymn to 1940's Paris' ground zero for jazz, artists, existentialists, hipsters, wanna-be's, stars, and hangers-on: the neighborhood of St Germain des Pres.Written by a Germanopratin and one of France's most unique postwar novelists, it's riddled throughout with big, beautiful period photos of locales, principal denizens, and famous slummers (Sidney Bechet, Prevert, Sartre and Beauvoir, Juliette Greco, even Garbo, Faulkner and Orson Welles, to name a few). The real attraction is the photos, but the content is pretty entertaining--part ethnography of a strange nocturnal and extinct species of Parisian scenester (both mocking and affectionate), part screed against the popular press' charicature of the neighborhood's inhabitants and habitues, it's funny, fascinating, and full of curious information.Did you know, for example, that the stereotypical existentialist's uniform included brightly colored Converse allstars and a plaid shirt unbuttoned to the navel? ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

hardboiled Vian
The firstbook from Vian I read was "L'ecumedes jours", so I was a bit stunned when I first picked up this book. The style is totally different, far from the surrealism and the pun of the other book. Instead: action , violenceandsexin "hardboiled" style, still seasoned withVian's sarcasm. In fact, Vian wrote it using the pseudonym of VernonSullivan, pretending to be just the translatorof this book "censored inthe US and first published in France". His publisherwas lookingfor an"american"novel, and Vian offered himself to write it, in 14 days; aproof of his ability, an hommage to his beloved America thathe nevervisited , and a violent attack to racism by a jazzfan and performer. ... Read more

Product Description
Boris Vian lived during a period of redefinition in France, from the instability of the Thirties, through the German Occupation, then into the friendly if overwhelming presence of the American liberators. Vian resisted identification with the movements now associated with mid-century French literary and intellectual history--surrealism, existentialism, the absurd--while creating a multifaceted ouvre that owed and contributed something to them all. This study concentrates, however, on the importance of American influences on Vian's extensive jazz activities and his mock translations of American noir novels under the name Vernon Sullivan. Vian personally embodied the increasingly transatlantic nature of Western culture and the melding of elite and popular forms of expression. The diverse components of this synthesis shed light on the construction of both individual and national identity in postwar France. ... Read more

Product Description
TamTam Books is proud (as usual) to announce the publication of Vernon Sullivan’s (or better known as Boris Vian) masterpiece of noir-gone berserk – The Dead All Have The Same Skin (Les Morts ont tous la Meme Peau).

Written one year after the controversial (putting it mildly), I Spit on Your Graves, you think Vian would have known better. But no, he decided to do another violent shocker that is ripped out of today's headlines. This surreal masterpiece of dark writing is about Daniel Parker, a bouncer in a hell-hole somewhere in New York City (Vian, a French man had never been to the States) who is blackmailed by his long lost brother who is black and threatens him to tell the truth about his brother's racial blood. Parker is not going to take that. His life, by that admission, becomes a tipsy topsey, one-way ticket to hell.

If that is not enough it also includes a short story by Vian "Dogs, Desire, and Death," which is an erotic tale of a bad girl, a helpless driver, and the need for destruction and sexual release. And no, not even that is not enough; we have a small essay or more like a rant by Vian regarding the history of his first controversial shocker I Spit on Your Graves. And not only that, but also a thoughtful and informative introduction by Marc Lapprand. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Review of THE DEAD ALL HAVE THE SAME SKIN from Los Angeles Times

Imagine an intellectual, astutely French, who hangs out with the likes of Jean-Paul Sartre, has a child's sense of humor and of the world's newness, writes radically perverse novels and spends his evenings playing trumpet with jazz bands 'round about the Left Bank. There you pretty much have Boris Vian.

Life on its own, however fervently and furiously embraced, was never enough for him. It needed the seasoning of imagination: rhetorical figures, filigrees of language, slapstick, turns of phrase and radical shifts of perspective, a touch of the mythic, a pinch of the mystic. He'd walk by front doors left ajar, squeeze his way in through a basement window propped half open.

In an early story about the Normandy invasion Vian wrote: "We arrived this morning and weren't well received. No one was on the beach but a lot of dead guys (or pieces of dead guys), tanks, and demolished trucks. Bullets flew from almost everywhere. . . . The boy just behind me had three-quarters of his face removed by a whizzing bullet. I put the pieces in my helmet and gave them to him."

Of the dead-unserious group in which he was central, he remarked, "Only the College of Pataphysicians does not undertake to save the world." Asked to fill out a form in triplicate, Vian said, the Pataphysician will remove the carbons and enter different information on each sheet. That playfulness and refusal to be pinned down peeks out, Kilroy-like, from all that Vian wrote.

His great novel, "L'Écume des jours" ("Foam of the Daze"), is a tragedy of young love in which a woman dies of the lily growing in her lung. As she worsens, her bed sinks closer and closer to the floor and the room grows ever smaller. In Vian's world, because the people they loved are gone, mice persuade diffident cats to kill them. Stallions are crucified for their sins. Children, when they stray -- as in "L'Arrache-coeur" ("Heartsnatcher") -- are shut into cages. Bells detach themselves from doors to come and announce visitors; neckties rebel against being knotted; some broken windowpanes grow back overnight, while others darken from breathing difficulties; armchairs and sausages must be calmed before use. When Colin, of "L'Écume," puts Duke Ellington's "The Mood to Be Wooed" on the phonograph, the O's on the record label cause the corners of the room to become round.

Vian died in 1959, at 39, while watching the screening of a film made from "J'Irai cracher sur vos tombes" ("I Spit on Your Graves"), a 1946 novel he wrote under the pseudonym Vernon Sullivan and put out as a translation. A bestseller in France, it became also a cause célèbre and the subject of litigation when a man strangled his mistress to death in a Montmartre motel, leaving behind a copy of the novel with violent passages marked. That novel, published in 1998 by TamTam, is the story of a black man who passes for white in a Southern town in order to avenge the lynching of his brother by courting and killing two white sisters.

"The Dead All Have the Same Skin" is, if not literally, then spiritually, a sequel. Vian wrote two further Vernon Sullivan novels, in which he kicked out all the stops and skidded toward parody; neither has the authority or purchase of the first two. Reminiscent of Chester Himes' sadly neglected "Run Man Run" in its intensity and its protagonist's needless headlong rush to oblivion, "The Dead All Have the Same Skin" also verges -- with its fierce energy, candor and matter-of-fact savagery -- on Jim Thompson territory: "I liked it. I got a kick out of pummeling the heads of those pigs. But after five years I've started to lose my taste for this particular sport. Five years and not a soul suspects it. No one has the slightest idea that a man of mixed blood, a colored man, has been the one pounding on their heads each and every night."

Dan Parker works as a bouncer in a New York club. It's all gone stale: drunken clients, available women, the buzz of violence, the hard-and-easy sex. Living as white in a white world, he has always felt out of place and vaguely afraid, but he has his home, his white wife and kid, his job. And when braced by Richard, a black man claiming to be his brother, Dan fears it will all come undone. From that moment, we are securely in the jaws of classic noir, as, driven by circumstance, careening from one dreadful act to another, Dan becomes his own chatty tour guide to damnation.

If only. . . .

But character is destiny and writes the script of our lives.

"I killed Richard for nothing. His bones snapped under the force of my hands. I killed the girl with one punch. And now the pawnbroker is dead, again for no reason. . . . I killed them all for absolutely no reason. And now I've lost Sheila and the hotel is being surrounded."

"The Dead All Have the Same Skin" came out in 1947, at the peak of success for "I Spit on Your Graves." These years were signal for Vian, seeing, along with the two Sullivan novels, the novels "Vercoquin et le plancton," "L'automne à Pékin" and "L'Écume des jours." "L'Herbe rouge" (1950) and "L'Arrache-coeur" (1953) followed, but none managed to match the triumph of the first Sullivan book. (When he died, Gallimard had more than 1,250 of the 4,400-copy run of "L'Écume" warehoused.)

In ensuing years, Vian's career skittered. He turned to translation, rendering into French novels by Kenneth Fearing and James M. Cain, as well as Raymond Chandler's "The Lady in the Lake" and "The Big Sleep." He wrote plays, such as "The Empire Builders" and "The General's Tea Party." He published poetry and numerous articles, many of these springing from, and reflecting, his pedigree as Pataphysician. He performed and recorded original songs, again achieving notoriety with his take on the Algerian war in "Le Déserteur." He wrote on jazz for Combat and other publications, these pieces latterly collected as "Round About Close to Midnight: The Jazz Writings of Boris Vian."

Certainly, Vian is not to every taste. As is said of pulp fiction, there's much silliness mixed in with the driven, hard-edged storytelling. Ever the iconoclast and reconstructed adolescent, Vian continually pushes boundaries and crawls under barricades, seeing how much he can get away with. Yet like other great arealist writers, he had a way of dipping into the pools of archetypes and primal emotions we all share -- very much, in fact, like Jacquemort, of "L'Arrache-coeur," condemned to fish the refuse of an entire village, all of its guilt, from the river with his teeth.

In recent years, L.A.-based publisher TamTam Books has given us an exemplary new translation of "L'Écume des jours," a new edition of "I Spit on Your Graves" and the first English translation of "L'automne à Pékin." Now TamTam, much to be commended, midwives this outstanding translation by Paul Knobloch, with a third Vernon Sullivan novel promised. *
James Sallis, Los Angeles Times May 4, 2008 ... Read more