Boris Vian Books

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.

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.

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.

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 become somewhat 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.

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.

A story that confronts us with most of human vices, and the vicious way we deal with other people and with our own fears. Amazing, as I think all Boris Vian's books are, with that little sparkle of fantasy that take us to a parallel world.

The characters lack human traits like compassion and love, and try to fill this gap in their personality, each in their own curel and detached way. The language by which Boris Vian describes this search is affectionate and intense. His parabels and stile of writing are at the same time stumbleingly awkward and grotesquely funny. No book has ever touched and disgusted me more than this one.

This book has been printed in the English translation (by John Sturrock) as "Heartsnatcher", by Quartet Books.

Boris Vian presents us one of his very best books, which relates a surreal portrait of feelings such as care, love, disappointment and nostalgia.

This book is totally awesome. I have read all Boris Vian's books in French and this translation is good. Some of his books are a little out-there for some people but I would highly recommend reading this book to everyone.

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.

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

In a nutshell, Elles se rendent pas compte is about a rich, spoiled playboy in the early 50's. In the beginning of the story, someone trys to kill him, so he ends up cross-dressing (and sleeping with lesbians, might I add) so his attackers can't recognize him. The plot is full of twists and turns, and as every boris vian book does to me, the ending will make you fall from your seat. I read this book one evening and couldn't put it down. If you liked the books he wrote as Vernon Sullivan, (i.e. j'irai cracher sur vos tombes, les morts ont tous la même peau, etc.), than you'll love this one too. It also has a touch of the absurdity of l'écume des jours, l'arrache-coeur and the other books he's famous for.

The first book from Vian I read was "L'ecume des 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 , violence and sex in "hardboiled" style, still seasoned with Vian's sarcasm. In fact, Vian wrote it using the pseudonym of Vernon Sullivan, pretending to be just the translator of this book "censored in the US and first published in France". His publisher was looking for an "american" novel, and Vian offered himself to write it, in 14 days; a proof of his ability, an hommage to his beloved America that he never visited , and a violent attack to racism by a jazz fan and performer.

*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.

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.

Another Boris Vian even better than all the rest. Broaden your horizons and read this!

Sometimes funny, often disturbing, thoroughly unique, and utterly fascinating. A psychoanalyst goes looking for desires to analyze because he lacks any of his own. He settles in a very bizarre and rather brutal village where shame is forbidden, horses are crucified, old folks auctioned, and a woman makes love at long distance with the blacksmith via a robotic spitting image of herself. Very weird, but not in the usual way. It's all presented so matter of factly, with such a straight face, that the effect is unlike any other literature of its kind.

"He propelled himself towards some particular piece of debris that was floating on the top and picked it up expertly between his teeth. It was a tiny hand. Covered with inkstains. He climbed back on board again. 'Tut, tut,' he said when he looked at it. 'Old Charlie's boy's been refusing to do his homework again."

In descriptions so richly imagined that he sometimes has to invent new words, Boris Vian brings to life the strange world discovered by a wandering traveler, Timortis, a psychiatrist who has been born an adult and has no memories of his own. An "empty vessel," he believes that if he can learn everything there is to know about someone through psychoanalysis, he can bring about a transferrence of identity and make his own life more complete. When he hears the cries of Clementine, a village woman giving birth to triplets, he stops to give aid and ends up delivering her sons--Noel, Joel, and Alfa Romeo.

Though the birthing scene is humorous, the full satirical flavor and the allegorical construction of this novel do not unfold until Timortis travels into the village. There he discovers that he has arrived just in time for the Old Folks Fair, at which old people are auctioned off like cattle and treated like them. Later Timortis visits a shop where he sees a child being worked to the verge of death, then revived with icewater. Farm animals, however, are given days off when they behave themselves and allowed to hitchhike if they need rides. A scapegoat, named Glory Hallelujah, retrieves putrid, decaying things from a blood-red stream with his teeth, his job being to "swallow the shame of the whole village." The vicar announces that "God is not utilitarian. God is a birthday present...a luxury, a tasseled cushion made of beaten gold." A horse is crucified for his sexual depravity. Additional bizarre episodes abound, leaving the reader to ponder the meaning of the non-stop action, at the same time that s/he is whisked along by the speed of Vian's prose to new and still more surprising events.

Puns, word play, and literary inventions fill the novel, even as Vian's often lyrical sentences and vibrant descriptions set the scenes. Satirizing the existing world for some of its most obvious faults, Vian presents a remarkably open-ended allegory, which makes the reader think at the same time that s/he often laughs at the absurdities and winces at the truths. But this is no full-blown alternative universe created to illustrate a serious and specific political or social agenda. Here Vian symbolically smiles at the reader as he leads Timortis through this strange community from episode to episode, illustrating his own opinions in a more or less random way, having fun all the time, while making some serious points. Not scholarly, though highly literate, this is a book for which one must buckle up, sit back, and just enjoy the ride. Mary Whipple

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).

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.
I believe 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, I'd say there's much more than a story.
I wish I could recommend a better English translation, but so far I've only read this one. All I can do is warn you about the poor quality of the edition presented here.

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...

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.

This over-rated book doesn't have much going for it except controversy created by some French Puritans in the 1950's who called it "pornography" and had it banned, thereby fueling its popularity. It's rather tame by today's standards, and very outdated and silly, not to mention dull. Most of the writing style is flat, drawn out prose, an imitation of Jack Keroauc and 1940's film noir crime novels, which the author translated. I find most of the scenes incredulous and there's a lot of "sex" going on, which doesn't seem very plausible in the novel. It deals with a black man who actually looks white who goes on to plot some type of revenge against "whitey".

i have read this book in his original native language as well now as in english . Both are terrific . It reads well in english becasue it takes place in the US . Vian was underated ... 5 stars still underrates him

This is a fascinating book, all its back history making it more so, and remarkable to think it was written in 1946.

For its time it is truly shocking and extremely graphic. Even by today's standards it is pretty explicit.

However, for all that there really isn't much to this novel. It only takes a couple of hours to read and as such is a 'pleasant' diversion but the book lacks substance. It only took 10 days to write as a bet and that shows in places. Having said all that it is a worthwhile read and a real eye opener.

Glad I read it, wouldn't go back to it, won't make it onto my all time list but conditionally recommended.

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.