Boris Vian - Böcker

Ten of Vian's best jazzy, outrageous short stories, evoking the seamy side of '50s Parisian night life

Autumn in Peking takes place in an imaginary desert called Exopotamie, where a train station and a railway line are under construction. Homes are destroyed to lay the lines, which turn out to lead nowhere. In part a satire on the reconstruction of postwar Paris, Vian’s novel also conjures a darker version of Alice in Wonderland.

First published in French in 1948, To Hell with the Ugly saw Boris Vian's noir-novelist pseudonym Vernon Sullivan take on Vian's own burlesque pop sensibilities. An erotic crime novel with science fiction tendencies, Sullivan's third outing is described by its translator as "a pornographic Hardy Boys novel set on the Island of Dr. Moreau to a be-bop soundtrack." To Hell with the Ugly recounts the tale of Rock Bailey, a dashing 19-year-old lad determined to hold onto his virginity amidst the postwar jazz-club nightlife of Los Angeles-a resolution challenged by the machinations of the demented Doctor Markus Schutz, who has decided to breed beautiful human beings and found a colony in which ugliness is a genetic crime. Vian's brutal depictions of American race relations in his previous Sullivan novels here give way to a frenetic fantasy of eugenics and uniformity-a parodic anticipation of the cosmetic surgery that was to rule Hollywood over the coming decades, as well as a comic-book reflection on Nazi Germany's visions of a master race. With the novel's breathless domino tumble of fist fights, car chases, kidnappings, and murders, Vian here set out to out-Hollywood Hollywood, serving up a narrative cocktail of Raymond Chandler, H.G.Wells, Brave New World and Barbarella.

Set in a bizarre and slightly sinister town where the elderly are auctioned off at an Old Folks Fair, the townspeople assail the priest in hopes of making it rain, and the official town scapegoat bears the shame of the citizens by fishing junk out of the river with his teeth. Heartsnatcher is Boris Vian's most playful and most serious work. The main character is Clementine, a mother who punishes her husband for causing her the excruciating pain of giving birth to three babies. As they age, she becomes increasingly obsessed with protecting them, going so far as to build an invisible wall around their property.

'A mad, moving, beautiful novel' IndependentThe world of Mood Indigo is a stained-glass cartoon kind of a place, where the piano dispenses cocktails, the kitchen mice dance to the sound of sunbeams, and the air is three parts jazz. Colin is a wealthy young aristocrat with a big heart. The instant he sees Chloe, bass drums thump inside his shirt, and soon the two are married. Typically generous, Colin gives a quarter of his fortune to his best friend Chick so he can marry Chloe's friend Alyssum.But a lily grows in Chloe's lung, and Colin must spend his remaining fortune on the only available treatment: surrounding her daily with fresh flowers. Chick squanders his share of Colin's money on rare books and it is not long before the friends are forced to sacrifice their carefree lives to soul-crushing work.A surreal cult classic that continues to inspire and endure, Mood Indigo is an animated and delightful satire.

A nonconformist satire of both bureaucracy and nonconformism from the French polymath and author of Foam of the DaysWritten 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.

A rollicking adventure caper satirizing the soon-to-be ubiquitous aspects of spy sagas First published posthumously in 1966, Trouble in the Swaths was written by Boris Vian for a small audience of family and friends during the Nazi Occupation of Paris. It is a flippant, at times outrageous parody of genre fiction laced through with bursts of Sadean violence, absurdist slapstick and excessive wordplay in which the author makes his fictionalized debut under such anagrammed monikers as the Baron Visi and the detective Brisavion. Despite preceding Ian Fleming’s novels by several years, Trouble in the Swaths nonetheless anticipates and ridicules such spy thrillers and their sexism, casual murders, plot twists and technological gadgetry. The adventure involves grenades and machine guns, planes and parachutes, trapdoors and underground caverns, a secret manuscript that endeavors to absorb the novel and, at the center of it all, the core of the narrative maelstrom: the “forked barbarin.”Boris Vian (1920–59) was a French polymath best known for his novels: both the crime novels he published under the pseudonym Vernon Sullivan and the surrealistic writing he published under his own name.