"Seven sciences" are called around these parts, not without a touch of sarcasm. Types like Boris vian They are one of those who approach all clubs, standing out in any of them. In the case of Vian, there was no cultural and even sociological space in which he could not print that stamp that captivated some and aroused the animosity of those who could never even dream of his ingenuity.
And that, perhaps in order not to overwhelm less capable creators and also because of a certain modesty before the avant-garde and daring of his novels, this French writer also signed with pseudonyms or heteronyms, almost always conforming maddening anagrams.
Deep down, Vian ended up excelling greatly in both music and literature. And like a good creator thrown into an open grave to explore new paths with no return, he was sometimes vilified, to achieve that aura of myth once he abandoned the scene and the intense script of his life that marked the end of him too soon.
Perhaps it is daring to compare it with Marcel Proust. But the truth is that in the omnipresent nature of the first genius, when he narrated his modern existential epics, we also find a Vian pataphysical. A Vian that in its autobiographical part also draws on that universal vision of subjective existence, with the greatest claim of impressionism made into a story.
Bitter like cioran, with that dreamlike and strangely desolate fantasy of Kafka. Boris Vian was not fussy about sprinkling everything with a necessary virulence. The one who assumes the truth as the only narrative motive, disguised as what he touches on stage but true at the end of the day.
Boris Vian's Top 3 Recommended Novels
Red grass
Nothing better than listening to the creator's motives for doing what he did, to write what he wrote. And it is always better to do it when one is already in retirement, in that more contemplative phase of a frenetic life where one analyzes with the mitigated drives of a youth that is being left behind.
With Vian's tormented creative future, this book mythologizes him even more. It is not that he makes amends or capitulation of what he was and what he did. However, an autobiography is always a justification that is rarely worth listening to, except when it comes from a genius. But of course, listening to Vian's reasons is not going to be about sitting in front of the fire while grandfather tells stories. Here the author leads us through his own rabbit hole to return to worlds exposed to excesses of light and icy shadows.
The engineer Wolf and his assistant, the mechanic lazuli, They build a time machine thanks to which Wolf tries, by returning to his childhood, to ward off all the errors and all the obsessions that had plagued him then. Only by exorcising those shadows will he be, he believes, in a position to regain the ability to enjoy the fleeting moments of happiness that life offers him. But we all know that the inquisitors do not accept such audacity and who knows if Wolf you will get over them ...
This is perhaps the most intimate and least burlesque novel of Vian, and many of the situations undoubtedly refer to his personal life. However, the tenderness that inspires this story, both painful and pathetic, Vian He cannot fail to add, as always in all his work, the overflowing fantasy and lucid insolence that gives characters and stories that magical and contagious vitality that captivates his readers from yesterday and today, more than unconditional addicts. .
The foam of the days
Understanding the beauty of the ephemeral as the only thing that remains under a Kunderista vision of life, love can only end up tormenting in its persistent presence or in its desperate romantic absence.
Once the trick is discovered, only the starkest humor remains; the hilarious sigh of someone who discovers the great trompe l'oeil; nihilism and the comic revision of everything as the only way out. Despite this, in the magical lucidity of every transcendent discovery, new intoxicating emotions of the tragedy of emptiness end up distilling. Boris Vian is in charge on this occasion, in one of his most brilliant compositions, of presenting us a love story aligned with a touch of surrealism, psychedelic color and maddening fantasies.
Almost twenty years after the death of its author it became one of the "best-sellers" of French literature. The festive tone, the fantasy of verbal games, the creation of a fantastic and unusual universe are the instruments that relate in a bittersweet tone a tragedy of the most refined simplicity, a drama in which the characters are innocent victims of the most ruthless and blind doom.
The heart ripper
There are those who break hearts and those who rip them out in the wildest way ever seen. Understanding everything from the metaphorical idealization of the heart as the engine of emotions, passions and any other primary sensations.
In one way or another, the time comes when we all wander around the world disheartened. No one loses their heart in childhood, because no one can break it nor can anyone rip it away from us. Children's hearts belong to their fantasies, to their secret worlds. If you are lucky to have buried it there, in the pre-maturity paradise, no one will ever be able to leave you without it. The unforgettable characters of Joël and Citroën were created by Boris Vian to suit the shocking delirium to which he believes they usually lead through a on the one hand, maternal domination and, on the other, the inevitable conflict between the autonomous, secret life of childhood and the tyranny of the family and social pressure.
He also uses the sinister Jacquemort, a psychoanalyst in search of patients, to satirize both the maddened world of the so-called sane and psychoanalysis and existentialist behavior, so in vogue in those years. It is precisely in the cycle of novels written between 1947 and 1953, to which El arrancacorazones belongs, that Vian seems to have settled in a universe that is finally his own, in a world of poetic fable full of fantasy, but also of tension and violence, in which the experience of children challenges the values of adults.
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