BORIS VIAN

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Released in SPRING 2013. Directed by MICHEL GONDRY. Starring AUDREY TAUTOU, ROMAIN DURIS, OMAR SY… BORISVIAN. L'écume des jours a novel.
BORIS VIAN L’écume des jours a novel "The most heartbreakingly poignant modern love story ever written." - Raymond Queneau

THE MOVIE Released in SPRING 2013. Directed by MICHEL GONDRY Starring AUDREY TAUTOU, ROMAIN DURIS, OMAR SY…

Boris Vian 1920 – 1959

B

oris Vian had wit, flair and style in his writing, was a man who embraced the popular culture of early 20th century Paris and, with his vibrant personality and eloquence, ruled the bars and cafés of Saint Germain. In the context of a pre- and post-war world where even the basics were enjoyed like luxuries, Vian's life and work gain power and significance. Youth in all its blazing glory and manic ruin, the rhythm of jazz, dark nightclubs, bent-up paperbacks that fit in your back pocket, alcohol, the pleasure of a sexual encounter, the first sting of love, the beauty of destruction, the sensual pleasure of reading a text and holding a book. These are all subjects that impassioned Vian, and which he includes in his writing, wrapped up in playful language and witty narrative. Vian defies simple labels, and throughout his life embodied many attitudes and roles: engineer, inventor, chronicler of jazz, trumpet player, poet and novelist, critic, creator of spectacles, actor, singer, pataphysician. He was born in 1920 and died, 39 years, 11 novels, and hundreds of poems later, in Paris. His collected works are published by Fayard.

L’écume des jours

(1947)

Boris Vian's masterpiece

L

'écume des jours (Foam of the Daze) is a jazz fuelled science fiction love story, filled with bittersweet romance, soaring absurdity and moments of desperate nihilism. It tells the story of a wealthy young man, Colin, and Chloe, the love of his life, who develops a water lily in her lung. The supporting cast includes Chick, an obsessive collector of famous 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. At once witty and deeply moving, Foam of the Daze is a nimble-fingered masterpiece that reflects on the transient nature of life, and bursts with frenetic energy: love and live, Vian seems to say, with the intensity of making love on a live grenade! Librairie Arthème Fayard hold the world rights to Boris Vian’s L’écume des jours. Rights already sold: Chinese (except Taiwan): NANJING UP

Portuguese (Brazil): COSAC & NAIFY

Czech: ARGO

Hungarian: PARLANDO (audio book), CARTAPHILUS

English : TAM TAM BOOKS (US), SERPENT’S TAIL (UK)

Italian: MARCOS Y MARCOS

Russian: AZBOOKA

Danish: LÖVE’S FORLAG

Korean: WOONGJIN THINK BIG

Slovak: POHODA

Georgian: DIOGENE

Macedonian: ILI-ILI

Spanish: CATEDRA (TRADE FORMAT),

German: ZWEITAUSENDEINS

Norwegian: TIDEN NORSK

ALIANZA (POCKET EDITION)

German (Austria): CHRISTOPH MERIAN VERLAG

Polish: WAB

Swedish: NORSTEDTS

Greek: NEFELI PUBLISHERS

Portuguese: RELOGIO D’AGUA

Turkish: E YAYINLARI

Romanian: UNIVERS

LIBRAIRIE ARTHEME FAYARD, 13 rue du Montparnasse, 75278 Paris Cedex 06, www.editions-fayard.fr



What the critics say about Foam of the Daze :

For the last thirty years L'Ecume des jours has been the author's best-known and most widely-discussed work: blending as it does the most light-hearted and playful fantasy with a sense of doom and tragedy that many readers across a wide range of ages and cultural backgrounds have found irresistibly moving, it is a novel that has paradox at its heart. -

David Meakin (quoted from his study L'Ecume des jours, published by the University of Glasgow)

L'Ecume des jours is full of good things - from farcical religious rites to the obsessions of a bibliophile which turn to fetishism and wreck his life. The set pieces are marvelous, rumbustious, and macabre. This is a tragic love story, a morbid and even a pathological farce. It is a book of failures and closures, and wonderfully destructive. -

Adrian Searle (From the British edition of L'Ecume des jours)

A kind of jazzy, cheerful, sexy, sci-fi mid-20th century Huysmans. Check it out. There is just no place like France. - Richard Hell You'll laugh. You'll cry. You'll smirk. -

Britt Brown, Flaunt Magazine, February 2004

Rays of sunlight stream through windows and congeal into honey-golden droplets on a tile floor, which are gathered like jewels by a friendly house mouse. A "pianocktail" concocts wild libations inspired by the jazz song played on it. Rifle barrels are grown like flowers in coffinshaped planters, which have to be warmed by naked human flesh. Metal-frog-powered Rube Goldberg machines crank out a pharmacy's medications. Cops tool around in skin-tight, bulletproof black leather and heavy metal boots. A weapon kills by attaching to the torso and ripping out the heart. Welcome to the wonderfully alive and terrifyingly human world of Boris Vian. -

Bret McCabe, Baltimore City Paper

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. [...] -

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

... offbeat, surrealist novel ... The novel reads like a combination of Lewis Carroll and Thomas Pynchon. - Thomas Hove, Review of Contemporary Fiction (Summer 2004)