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A nonconformist satire of both bureaucracy and nonconformism from the French polymath and author of Foam of the Days Written at the age of 23 for his friends in the winter of 1943-44, Vercoquin and the Plankton was the first of Vian's novels to be published under his own name. Published in 1947, the book came out two months after his succès de scandale I Spit on Your Graves and two months before the publication of his beloved classic The Foam of the Days. At once social documentary, scathing satire and jazz manifesto, Vercoquin and the Plankton describes the collision of two worlds under the Vichy regime: that of the youthful dandyism of the ever-partying Zazous and the murderously maniacal bureaucracy of a governmental office for standardization. In this roman à clef drawn from Vian's own contradictory lives as a jazz musician on the Left Bank and an engineer at the French National Organization for Standardization, the reader is introduced to a handful of characters inhabiting a world lying somewhere between Occupied Paris and Looney Tunes. Boris Vian (1920-59) was a French polymath who in his short life managed to inhabit the roles of writer, poet, playwright, musician, singer/songwriter, translator, music critic, actor, inventor and engineer, before dying of a heart attack at the age of 39, after authoring ten novels, several volumes of short stories, plays, operas, articles and nearly 500 songs. Vian is remembered as one of the reigning spirits of the postwar Parisian Latin Quarter, a friend to everyone from Jean-Paul Sartre to Raymond Queneau and Miles Davis, playing trumpet with Claude Abadie and Claude Luter, and an influence on such future kindred spirits as Serge Gainsbourg.
Presents a story in which a husband must try to keep his ill wife alive by constantly surrounding her with fresh flowers.
Fiction. "In the tradition of Karl May and Franz Kafka, Boris Vian imagines an American even more amazing that the land he has never visited. "I Spit on Your Graves" is the first novel to put the quotation marks around the "hardboiled" thriller -- a vivid and startling performance" (J. Hoberman). The book is Boris Vian's (1920-1959) sex-and-violence-filled homage to American noir. Originally published in France as J'rai Cracher Sur Vos Tombes -- after allegedly being censored in the U.S. and "translated" into French -- the novel was no best seller, establishing Vian as one of the most famous writers of the mid-twentieth century.
Boris Vian is a rare phenomenon. Nothing short of a national treasure in France, he is hardly known overseas. In his lifetime, he divided literary opinion with masterpieces that failed to sell and best sellers that caused outrage, trials and even deaths, including his own. As an impresario, he became the figurehead of the jazz scene that marked the French left bank at the end of the Second World War and was responsible for bringing Duke Ellington and Miles Davis to France. As a musician, he played his trumpet against the advice of cardiologists, sang pacifist songs before audiences of outraged patriots and, in passing, created French rock ‘n’ roll. Posthumously, he became known for his theatre, film scripts and poetry as well as for his novels. And in May ’68 he became a revolutionary icon.
Boris Vian s early death robbed French literature of a novelist who was coherent while still modern. Heartsnatcher is an esoteric, surrealistic comedy about guilt, set in a deceptively familiar, almost ordinary locale. New Statesman
This is the first comprehensive study of the relationship between Retranslation and Reception. New translations always reveal a changing interest in authors and their work, and this book explores this phenomenon through a wide variety of case studies of literary reception.
The basis of the new major movie from Michel Gondry, starring Audrey Tautou, the beloved French modern classic hailed as "the most poignant love story of our time" by Raymond Queneau The story is simple: Boy meets girl; boy marries girl; girl falls ill on their honeymoon with a water lily on the lung, which can only be treated by being surrounded by flowers; boy goes broke desperately trying to keep his true love alive. First published in 1947, Mood Indigo perfectly captures the feverishly creative, melancholy romance of mid-century Saint-Germain-des-Prés. Recently voted number ten on Le Monde's list of the 100 Books of the Century (the top ten also included works by Camus, Proust, Kafka, Hemingway, and Steinbeck), Boris Vian's novel has been an icon of French literature for fifty years—the avant-garde, populist masterpiece by one of twentieth-century Paris's most intriguing cultural figures, a touchstone for generations of revolutionary young people, a jazz-fueled, science-fiction-infused, sexy, fantastical, nouveau-decadent tear-jerker that has charmed and beguiled hundreds of thousands of readers around the world. With the help of Michel Gondry and Audrey Tautou, it is set to seduce many, many more.
Fiction. Translated from the French by Paul Knobloch. Originally published in 1947. "In the Exopotamian desert, where hepatrols blossom and children collect little animals called sandpeepers, the sun shines in an unusual way: it produces eerie black zones whose mysteries remain unexplained. Above all, Vian's pecurilar way with language proves that, indeed, life in the desert is equal to none. Since unusual language is bound to produce unusual fiction, it follows that the story does not take place in the fall, nor is it set in China" - from the Foreword by Marc Lapprand. The fourth novel by Vian, who was a contemporary of Sartre and Beauvoir. His innovative style, cutting-edge during his lifetime, but only successful in the sixties, made him an icon of the May 1968 student movement.
Honoré de Balzac's 1830 Treatise on Elegant Living was a keystone text on dandyism, preceding Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly's Anatomy of Dandyism (1845) and Charles Baudelaire's "The Dandy" (in The Painter of Modern Life, 1863), and marking an important shift from the early dandyism of the British Regency to the intellectual and artistic dandyism of nineteenth-century France. The Treatise is the first true philosophical expression of dandyism, and is full of well-crafted aphorisms: "Elegant living is, in the broad acceptance of the term, the art of animating repose," runs one classic definition of dandyism, and "One must have studied at least as far as rhetoric to lead an elegant life" asserts the importance of verbal pirouette and dexterous quipping to the dandy. Further embellished with anecdotes and historical and personal illustrations, Balzac's Treatise even features a fictitious encounter with the original dandy himself, Beau Brummell. Never before translated into English, this witty tract makes for an illuminating cornerstone to Balzac's Human Comedy (which was originally to have included a never-completed four-part philosophical "Pathology of Social Life"). Above all, it represents a decisive moment in the history of dandyism, and an entertaining exposition on the profundities of what lies deepest within all of us: our appearance.
Mr. Gica is the world's greatest barber. He holds the world record for sculptural hairstyling and has won three Olympic golds in neck massage. But his specialty is the shave. Mr. Gica's shop has six mirrors on the walls, six sinks, six barber chairs and no employees. Always crowded, its chairs always occupied, the barbershop forms an off-kilter microcosm: a world of melancholic kitsch that includes opera singers, football players, gladiators, the secret police, four lost hippies and other ludic figures--including our superhuman protagonist's ever-lurking antagonist in perpetual disguise, Dorel Vasilescu. Trying on a variety of voices and modes like so many work coats, Curlscissor-snips love poems, mock-critical commentaries with footnotes, dreams, diary entries, streams of words without punctuation, cultural references and a number of rebellious hairs off a number of necks to sculpt a patchwork portrait of universal loneliness. This is the first translation of T.O. Bobe into English. T.O. Bobe(born 1969) is a Romanian poet, novelist and screenwriter living in Bucharest. Two of his books have been finalists for prestigious Romanian ASPRO prizes.