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I've read one Vian book Larry Send a noteboard - 02/02/2011 03:50:16 AM
I guess the titles more likely to interest me on the list I've already read, but while you're in the vein between Calvino and Carroll (wide ground, I know!), you might want to give a try to Boris Vian one day. He remains way too little known by anglosaxons (despite the heavy influence of Carroll and Swift on his writing, and despite he was a huge americanophile)


I read his Heartsnatcher a couple of years ago in translation and enjoyed it. Really should try more of his work, though.

His most acclaimed novel (posthumously. None of his novels under his own name had much success in his lifetime, unlike those he wrote as Vernon Sullivan, fake American crime novels he pretended to be the translator of) would be "L'Écume des Jours", which became an iconic novel of May 68 (as the incarnation of the "L'imagination au pouvoir" slogan), though L'Herbe Rouge, which deals with darker, more serious themes under the fantastical elements and humour might be more your cup of tea - and its fits square into the spec fic genre, with his SF elements and weird universe (it's my second favourite after L'Automne à Pékin, in which the protagonist takes the bus to work one morning and and end up instead in a desert where an extremely weird cast is building a train line to nowhere that ends up in nothing at the end.).

I don't know if bilingual editions of his novels exist, though I guess he might be worth cheating one using a French edition and an American edition (he's getting translated in English in recent years) if they don't. He might be challenging in French only - so many wordplays, semantic shifts, fanciful plays with syntax and spelling. One example from a chapter I read yesterday: the protagonist enters a room where his friend and his lover where just having sex. The girl turned on her heels (tourné les talons) and left the room (trying to ajust a skirt that isn't in the mood because it was in the middle of a conversation with a coat left on the bed) Vian will rather write "lorsqu'elle eut tourné l'étalon", ie: after she had gone around the stallion). That one's pretty obvious, but Vian's the sort of writer with which you need to read every word on the page or he rapidly loses you (and he tries to!) His novels (but one) are really short, though (about Le Petit Prince short).

Better read with some Duke Ellington in the background, for the proper mood.

If one has to pick only one novelist from the 1940s in France that'd be Camus, but Vian ought not to be far behind, IMO. He's certainly the most imaginative and playful writer from these decades, with a jazzy and very musical prose and not without some depth underneath the more farcical elements (as alas few like Queneau and de Beauvoir saw in him in his days. A reviewer had even dismissed him as "the Pope of Existentialism's altar boy". Another called him Sartre's pet monkey! Most of his contemporary reviewers discussed more the public figure Vian was at St-Germain than his books.)


Camus I now read in French; quite good (and more nuanced than what I've encountered in translation).

He's got his revenge though. Unlike most of his "stuffy" contemporaries that got long forgotten, he's still widely read today (he's more read than Sartre's novels, even), many writers claim him as a major influence, covers of his songs are still recorded, his plays are still mounted on stage at home and abroad (especially his anti-war ones recently), he's become one of the most popular French writers post-1990 in eastern Europe (a phenomenon the Vian scholars are still a bit puzzled over) and though he's attracted scholarly attention and enthusiasm long ago now he's "made the big leagues" with the literary establishement by being this year's new entry in La Pléiade (right on Camus's heels). I went in to buy the Borges (now back in print) but just couldn't resist postponing that purchase when I saw Vian had made La Pléiade.

I think you'd have the right interests/frame of mind to have fun with Vian despite the language barrier. He certainly had his unique kind of "speculative fiction".
Illusions fall like the husk of a fruit, one after another, and the fruit is experience. - Narrator, Sylvie

Je suis méchant.
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So you're given a list of books from which to choose those you want to know more about... - 30/01/2011 04:13:47 AM 1133 Views
That looks like pretty standard fare stuff. No offense intended. - 30/01/2011 06:51:09 AM 847 Views
I'm mostly revisiting books I read in my late teens to mid-20s - 30/01/2011 07:42:48 AM 881 Views
The themes may improve. His inability to form any sort of coherent style likely will remain. - 30/01/2011 08:55:10 PM 784 Views
I disagree. Quite strongly, actually. *NM* - 30/01/2011 09:10:34 PM 405 Views
Well, you're entitled to be wrong. *NM* - 30/01/2011 09:24:55 PM 379 Views
These ones: - 30/01/2011 01:07:58 PM 882 Views
Don't choose Gurney! - 30/01/2011 02:23:14 PM 890 Views
I'm just intrigued by someone writing about the Hittites. *NM* - 30/01/2011 07:15:00 PM 368 Views
There is a much better book on the Hittites, though. - 31/01/2011 02:11:03 AM 735 Views
I think Camilla ought to read Flight to Lucifer - 30/01/2011 04:42:32 PM 822 Views
I am doing very well pretending Bloom does not exist - 30/01/2011 06:54:24 PM 714 Views
You might like his novel, though - 30/01/2011 07:03:09 PM 712 Views
Re: You might like his novel, though - 30/01/2011 07:12:30 PM 845 Views
Not too badly - 30/01/2011 07:21:03 PM 713 Views
S'why I chose it. *NM* - 30/01/2011 07:15:29 PM 445 Views
Ha! *NM* - 30/01/2011 07:20:23 PM 419 Views
Okay. - 30/01/2011 01:13:24 PM 771 Views
The number of votes for Chaucer is curious - 30/01/2011 04:41:37 PM 856 Views
I find Chaucer less interesting than Boccaccio *NM* - 30/01/2011 06:50:44 PM 417 Views
I'm divided on the two - 30/01/2011 07:02:32 PM 736 Views
Well... could be an international readership? - 30/01/2011 07:38:51 PM 815 Views
Very possible, considering 1/3 or so of the blog's readership isn't Anglo-American *NM* - 30/01/2011 09:11:26 PM 394 Views
Re: Very possible, considering 1/3 or so of the blog's readership isn't Anglo-American - 30/01/2011 11:04:11 PM 723 Views
There is that as well - 02/02/2011 03:52:40 AM 854 Views
Re: There is that as well - 02/02/2011 11:57:26 AM 987 Views
Very true. *NM* - 30/01/2011 09:12:46 PM 405 Views
Hm. - 30/01/2011 09:35:18 PM 1161 Views
Heathen! - 02/02/2011 03:55:46 AM 958 Views
Beckett, Boccaccio, Calvino. *NM* - 30/01/2011 10:29:38 PM 529 Views
Re: So you're given a list of books from which to choose those you want to know more about... - 30/01/2011 10:31:09 PM 989 Views
I've read one Vian book - 02/02/2011 03:50:16 AM 1172 Views
Hmm ... - 31/01/2011 12:20:37 AM 1127 Views

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