“... Putting aside the comb, Colin armed himself with nail clippers and cut the edges of his matte eyelids obliquely to give a mysterious look. He often had to do this - the eyelids quickly grew back. So unexpectedly begins the surrealistic novel "Foam of Days" (in the original "L'Écume des jours"), which is read in one breath and will not leave anyone indifferent.
For me, the novel "Foam of Days" is a unique work and has no analogues in world literature. When I first read it many years ago, it made a deep impression on me that has not faded to this day. This is a book that is read in one breath.
This work combines many genres. This is a drama with fantastic, even rather surreal elements and black humor. Of course, you will not surprise anyone with absurd prose, let alone poetry, however, I will continue to insist that this work is unique in its kind. Of course, Vian was greatly influenced by his personal acquaintance with the classic of absurdist drama Eugène Ionesco and the thinkers of that time Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. The fate of Boris Vian himself was unusual.
The French writer lived a short life (1920-1959), but managed to try himself as a jazz musician and performer of his own songs, he wrote novels, plays, poems, film scripts, ballet librettos, translated from English, sculpted sculptures and painted pictures. And the writer died of a heart attack in the cinema while watching the premiere - the film adaptation of the black action movie "I'm Coming to Spit on Your Graves", written by him under the pseudonym Vernon Sullivan. Researchers became interested in Vian's work after his death, in the 1960s.
In the grip of the absurd
Traditionally, in the novel "Foam of Days" there are three storylines: the main, love-lyrical (Kolen and Chloe); "existentially-partra" (Shik and Aliza) and absurdist - everything else.
Moreover, the absurd layer constantly, easily and naturally seeps into the first two.
The heroes of the novel are cut off from life, which is why their love lines are so unrealistic and sugary. They are young, beautiful, rich, cheerful and carefree. They don’t go through life, but flutter, and in the literal sense: “Kolen’s heart swelled to an incredible size, then soared up, tore him off the ground, and he flew in ...”.
The characters know no worries other than partying, morning dressing (the bright, carefree dandy outfits that Colin lovingly chooses in front of the mirror) and a hearty dinner. Both parallel love novels (Kolen-Chloe and Shik-Aliz) - the main character and his friend - are written as a carbon copy: a very beautiful girl, love at first sight, cloudless relationships and flying on a cloud ... Since the beginning of the novel is a children's fairy tale, each The wishes of the characters come true at the click of a finger. A striking example is the honeymoon scene. When, during their honeymoon trip in a big white limousine, Colin and Chloe became "somehow uncomfortable with the scenery rushing past" and Chloe said: "I hate this dim light, this haze," Colin "pressed the green, blue, yellow both red buttons and multicolored filters have replaced car windows. Now Colin and Chloe seemed to be inside a rainbow, and colored shadows danced on the white fur of the seat ... ". This is an example of escapism - an escape from harsh reality into a fictional universe.
I wanted gourmet dishes - the witty chef Nicolas is already conjuring in the kitchen, I wanted refined alcohol - get a piano cocktail, I thought about love - a charming bride immediately appeared on the horizon. Until reality invades life in the face of an incurable disease and death.
A man loves a woman, she gets sick and dies
Shortly before his death, Vian said of the novel "Foam of Days": "I wanted to write a novel, the plot of which is in one phrase: a man loves a woman, she gets sick and dies." The motif of the death of a beloved and the hero's suffering for her is one of the most popular motifs in world literature. Interestingly, this is a favorite plot move by Vian's contemporary, Erich-Maria Remarque. Thus, one can trace plot parallels in two of my favorite books - Vian's Foam of Days and Remarque's Three Comrades (1936). In both cases, the carefree life of friends is forever changed with the fatal illness of the beloved. Both books have tragic and predictable endings. Even the diseases of the heroines are similar - tuberculosis and a water lily-nymphea that has grown in a lung (essentially the same tuberculosis in its absurd version). I think this coincidence is due to the fact that both authors wrote in the post-war period. Remarque is attributed to the authors of the "lost generation", whose novels are devoted to the life of soldiers who cannot adapt to post-war life, because their psyche is broken by the war. And Vian's novel was written during the Second World War and was completed immediately after it. Perhaps Colin and Schick are also representatives of the lost generation, only they were lost not in post-war Europe, but in their fictional world?
At the beginning of the novel, we see a light-hearted fantasy flirting with the reader. In the second part, it becomes more and more gloomy. The idyll is crumbling before our eyes. Vian managed to create his own fragile fantasy world that does not tolerate contact with reality. This waking dream, at first filled with a fantasy as light as cotton candy, gradually develops into a terrible grotesque. This moment of transition is most successfully conveyed by the author. Thus, the novel combines two genres - utopia and dystopia.
Vian managed to create his own fragile fantasy world that does not tolerate contact with reality. This waking dream, at first filled with a fantasy as light as cotton candy, gradually develops into a terrible grotesque.
It's amazing how the world changes with the characters. In fact, what is described here is what happens to each of us, although we try not to notice it. For example, newlyweds Colin and Chloe's idyllic nest shrinks with Chloe's illness, and her bed sinks to the floor. Vian shows that his characters cannot exist in the real world, merciless to creatures, soaring from flower to flower and charmingly helpless.
The main character has to work. The job search scene is one of the most powerful, scary and memorable in the book. Kolen comes to a greenhouse where people grow weapons from metal with the heat of their own breasts. Loving sensitive Colin is too gentle for the job. Its heat makes beautiful roses grow out of metal, not weapons. The man who hired him copes with it, but has turned into a twenty-nine-year-old man. What could be worse than this metaphor?
Any uncreative, unfilled with love work disgusts Vian. Especially destructive business of war. As the Latin proverb says: when cannons speak, the muses are silent. The worst thing that can happen is the transformation of a person into a mechanism suitable only for military operations.
The first part of the novel simply sparkles with bright colors, their entire palette - from "ordinary" colors (blue, red, green) to "neologism colors": the color of coconut with milk, sour green. “The knee…was so open that you could see blue and purple thoughts throbbing in the veins of his arms.” In the episode of Chloe's funeral, everything turns into a colorless, faded mess. In the same scene, black humor reaches its apotheosis - Colin's conversation with the crucified indifferent Jesus, the suicide of a mouse, the blind orphanage girls singing a psalm ...
In general, the aesthetics of black humor has always been close to Vian (this is most clearly manifested in the novel "I will come to spit on your graves").
Piano cocktail and hearteder
There is a lot of autobiography in the novel. First of all, you pay attention to the abundance of music. The names of jazz compositions are easily woven into the canvas of the novel, becoming a code that the characters exchange. What is one piano cocktail worth - the dream of many readers of the novel. By playing any tune on the piano cocktail, you can make a cocktail and taste it. The heroes of the novel drink cocktails to the tunes of Ellington and Armstrong... The love of the protagonist is also naturally accompanied by a musical leitmotif - Ellington's "Chloe", because this is the name of Colin's beloved. Of course, auditory (or rather musical) associations are Vian's main tool. But besides this, it immerses us in the bright world of taste, tactile and visual sensations. For example, the same piano cocktail is a fusion of taste and auditory impressions.
The mechanisms invented by Vian, which fill the novel, play a special role in it. This is both a pianoctail - a symbol of dolce vita, and a terrible murder weapon sertseder, which Aliza plunges into Partre's chest (appears again in Vian's novel of the same name "Sertseder").
Of course, the novel is very difficult for theatrical and even film productions.
Kolen comes to a greenhouse where people grow weapons from metal with the heat of their own breasts. Loving sensitive Colin is too gentle for the job. Its heat makes beautiful roses grow out of metal, not weapons.
It is similar to Ibsen's Peer Gynt and Goethe's Faust with an abundance of fantastic elements that are difficult to convey by stage means. In Vian, the "bored" Jesus on the crucifix, a cat and a mouse, as if they came from a Disney cartoon, are endowed with the gift of voice.
In general, this mouse is an important character in the book, a barometer of the mood of the story. At the beginning, she rejoices along with the carefree life of Colin and Chloe, basking in the sun. Then, when Chloe gets sick, she hurts herself on the glass. And when Chloe dies, she commits suicide in the cat's mouth.
Like Lewis Carroll, Vian repeatedly uses the technique of literal interpretation of metaphorical expressions and phraseological units (for example, "the walls are moving up"). The word game is expressed in a series of neologisms, puns, speaking names. Young people at the party dance fashionable dances: squint, dislocation and chills. Chloe is being treated by Dr. D "Ermo. The wedding ceremony and funeral are led by such ridiculous characters with altered church ranks as Priest, Priest, Drunkard and Archbishop. It is interesting that the description of the wedding and the funeral are somewhat similar. Thus, the story actually began with the wedding, closes with a funeral according to the canons of the ring composition.
In the style of Vian there is something from the classic of the French grotesque, Francois Rabelais. He also likes to break boundaries, laugh at religious sacraments, sometimes add something conditionally “greasy, indecent” (although the rules of decency are different in the Vian universe). So the organization of a wedding ceremony is impossible without "wedding pederals".
Fantastic elements act as an instrument of witty parody. Behind the cardboard idol Jean-Sol Partre one can easily guess the idol of millions, an existentialist philosopher with whom Vian knew personally. The titles of his works are also parodied - for example, "Nausea" became "Puke". By the way, in the novel there is also a grotesque image of the Duchess de Boudoir (Simone de Beauvoir).
Vian ridicules the philosopher, to whom he had friendly feelings, not in order to ridicule his philosophy, but to question the idea of ultimate truth.
Every time I look at a film adaptation of some book that I have not read, I, not being able to compare with the text, make mental and spiritual efforts to understand whether I wanted to get acquainted with the book original after watching it or I will get by. These are the criteria for evaluation, very dubious, but considering that at least one third of the films on the planet are based on novels, short stories or short stories by different authors tell me that you always read a work beforehand in order to watch a movie based on it later. Well, brag!
After “Foam of Days”, despite some shortcomings of the picture, I still wanted to know the work of Boris Vian. As it became known, the film does not deviate from the original, even just weakly, it is very accurately staged, and the great merit of the director is that he filmed the fantasy-romantic story so painstakingly, carefully, beautifully and with respect for Vian. They say that it is difficult to film his novels, because even the death of the author is connected with the disappointment of watching a picture based on his own book “I will come to spit on your graves”, which is symbolic (and, perhaps, one of the most unusual sudden deaths).
But I will begin to comprehend what I saw in the Foam of Days. This is a magical sight.
Audrey Tautou starred in unusual melodramas. I remember "Amelie" with her. It is unlikely that anyone will say that these two films are passing and do not differ from the canonical examples of the genre. "Foam of Days" is replete with unusual techniques, strange and eccentric technologies, striking allegories, distorted images and the author's approach. Every frame here is like a discovery. By the middle of the session, there are too many discoveries (which are impossible to describe), so the action gradually acquires a dramatic, serious, sometimes tragic meaning from ironic and positive. I am sure that many receptive and sentimental viewers will be deeply affected by the film.
The most interesting thing, in my opinion, is that from a bright color, the situation, as the affairs of the main characters worsen, almost imperceptibly turns into black and white. That a lot of secretaries type this story, and then Colin tries to interfere with it. That the ease of viewing soon fades, after which the plot slows down, becoming an art house, heavy, hopeless, and miracles go somewhere, disappear in a haze of memories, leaving the pain to live alone with a person.
Perhaps the qualities that seemed to me to be shortcomings in the film are a bust with all sorts of variations of images and a too smooth transition from happiness to grief. Michel Gondry plays with characters and objects, which sometimes crosses the line of fantasy, in some ways even reminiscent of a narcotic dope, accompanied by abundant but pleasant schizophrenia. Probably, I'm just not used to such a presentation, which does not prevent me from evaluating the cinema as a good, high-quality, aesthetic French canvas, upon acquaintance with which you experience completely different feelings. The main ones are extreme surprise, laughter from improvisational humor, fear from sudden shadows (from which for some reason it also involuntarily pulls you to be afraid and laugh at the same time), a romantic mood of sentimentality and subsequent empathy, turning into sorrowful sadness and the very feeling when you see the injustice of the world, and there's nothing you can do about it. Suddenly and at the same time slowly, beautifully, irreversibly bewitching world withers and dies.
I would recommend the film to all those who miss originality in cinema, who are not indifferent to good adaptations, who have a love for cinema as a true art. Full immersion is guaranteed, and a purely French presentation will add to it a special experience that cannot be compared with others.
There is a French writer, long dead, Boris Vian. It could not be published not for political reasons, but for artistic ones, because of the very method of artistic presentation. And so I decided not to really back down from this task and translated his little novel “Foam of Days”. And at that moment I was asked to conduct a seminar for young translators from French - university graduates and foreigners. I invited Nemochka Naumov to lead this seminar with me, and together we decided - which was quite bold - to distribute to our children for translation based on Vian's story.
A more difficult prose writer to translate, in my opinion, does not exist - it's like translating poetry. Because Vian is all in a play on words, in associations, in idioms that cannot be found in the Russian language, since each language has its own idiomatic expressions and the whole game is based on French phraseology. So, what is the task in such cases? In short, it is imperative to find your own, completely different idiom or pun, often ten miles from the French, but which evokes the same feeling, the same association. This is an extremely difficult task, it is really like a line of a poem, an image of a poem, it is not at all easier. It took me a long time to translate Foam of Days. She translated six and a half sheets, probably for almost two years, half a page, a page a day, and even then not every day.
In general, Vian's collection was made for three years. The editor who led it was a very nice person, he kept telling me: Lilya, just don’t rush, let the director go on vacation, let this one get sick, he will go to another job ... Because the volume had to be promoted through the authorities, bypassing possible dangers. Vian writes in the preface that there is nothing in the world worth living for except beautiful girls and jazz music. Well, is it possible to translate and print such a book in the Soviet Union? Unfortunately, this editor himself did not live to see the release of the collection. And the book, surprisingly, was published. Well, it was a success - this is not the right word: it leaked like a drop of water into dry sand in an instant.
Vian's number is ten. He was born on March 10, wrote 10 novels, was destined for 10 years of literary creativity, and his heart broke after 10 minutes of watching a film based on his own masterpiece, which began at 10 o'clock in the morning ...
But be silent: the incomparable right -
Choose your own death.
N.S. Gumilyov. Choice
Boris Vian did not die somehow. He symbolically died on June 23, 1959 at the premiere of the film based on his thrash thriller I'm Coming to Spit on Your Graves. Vian lasted only ten minutes of watching, then rolled his eyes, leaned back in his chair and died without regaining consciousness in an ambulance on the way to the hospital. That is, the last thing he saw in his life was that low-grade pulp fiction, that horror that he himself created ...
Vian's number is ten. He was born on March 10, wrote 10 novels, was destined for 10 years of literary creativity, and his heart broke after 10 minutes of watching a film based on his own masterpiece, which began at 10 o'clock in the morning ... Stop. Let's, as happens in films based on thrash thrillers, go back to where it all began and try to figure out why it all ended the way it did.
Good, bad, nigga
So, Vian was born on March 10, 1920 in the tiny town of Ville-d'Avre not far from Paris and received the name Boris, strange for a native Frenchman, in honor of the opera Boris Godunov, which his musical mother went crazy about ... No, not That. Scrolling forward... Here! Vian is two years old. He suffered a severe sore throat with heart complications, gets rheumatism for life. Fifteen years. Vian falls ill with typhoid fever. Again the consequences on the heart. All! The formation of the mortal body of the future writer is completed: heart disease, aortic insufficiency. Vian chooses his early death, deciding to play the trumpet, which was categorically contraindicated for him, but which, of course, reflected (even then, at the age of fifteen!) His desperate, passionate and philosophical view of life and death at the same time.
Yes, and during his lifetime, Carroll had to "correspond" and hide his versatile, active and somewhere even stormy life under the impenetrable mask of Victorian respectability. Needless to say, an unpleasant occupation; for such a principled person as Carroll, this was undoubtedly a heavy burden. And yet, it seems that a deeper, more existential contradiction was hidden in his personality, in addition to the constant fear for his professorial reputation: “oh, what will Princess Marya Aleksevna say.” Here we come close to the problem of Carroll the Invisible, Carroll the third, who lives on the dark side of the Moon, in the Sea of Insomnia.
The history of Boris Vian's work is practically the history of his illness. Vian was not a healthy person. As one researcher of the writer's work wittily noted, "cardiac arrhythmia also determined the arrhythmia characteristic of Vian with the mentality of his time." When all of France was experiencing an all-out fascination with American pop culture against the backdrop of general euphoria from the liberation of Paris by the Allies, Vian spat at everyone from a high bell tower. He played jazz in spite of everything, played, as contemporaries noted, with the corner of his mouth, standing firmly on his legs wide apart. Sweet, romantic, flowery and desperate; played jazz blacker than black. He dared to be himself - a mortally ill pessimist passionately in love with life.
There is a saying (it seems to belong to Osho): the health of all healthy people is the same, but everyone has their own illness. That is, the disease determines the individuality. In some cosmic sense, individuality itself is something unimaginably sacred in the West! - and there is the most dangerous disease, a kind of runny nose. In this esoteric sense, Vian, too, I repeat, was not a healthy person.
He was endowed with individuality beyond all measure: at least three individuals coexisted in him: firstly, an intellectual who graduated from the famous Central School, the brilliant author of Foam of Days; secondly, Vernon Sullivan, a greedy long-dollar scribbler with a pile of best-selling tabloid novels, and, finally, a simple white negro who wanted only one thing in life: to play jazz like Bix Beiderbeck (the great American jazz player, 1903-1931). Vian knew that he would die early, and lived three times more greedily than any contemporary French writer, spending his obscenely, Rasputin-style rich vitality right and left. For which he paid.
It's time, it's time, let's rejoice in our lifetime
The whole, in Yegorletov's way, B. Vian's "long happy life", which began on March 10, 1920 and ended only 40 years later, passed in the shadow of a serious illness. But partly thanks to this divine shadow that fate sent him, Vian was not completely blinded by the sun that makes the average human plankton mediocrely enjoy life until death. He was a one-eyed king in a country blinded by the sun of peace, order and prosperity. He was a terrorist king who undermined the very foundations of this peace, order and prosperity. He was the most political anarchist imaginable. He was, one might say, a second-generation existentialist (like a color TV instead of black and white), an order of magnitude more existential than existentialism itself. A lone terminator of postmodernism, lost in time, who came to dig up the living graves of everything that has died for good, and of everything that has yet to die in the interests of humanity.
It is symbolic in this regard that soon after Vian's death, his beautiful, completely Russian face was firmly forgotten, although not for long. Vian was erected on a prophetic pedestal only two years later. And not because he scandalously died at his premiere: the sixties simply came, and the psychedelic writer, rebelling against everything and everything, came to court. The dead Vian was famous in a way that he had never been in his lifetime, although all his best works had long since been published.
In the animal world
Famous after death - this actually means that "forgotten in life." But Vian could not complain about the lack of attention from fortune. For example, in those very fatal fifteen years, he receives not only a heart defect for life, but also a bachelor's degree in Latin and Greek. Two years later (at seventeen) Vian completed his bachelor's degree in two more disciplines: philosophy and mathematics! Boris Vian remade a lot of everything in his life: he wrote prose and poetry (and even operas, which pleased his mother), played the trumpet very well in a jazz orchestra and sang, professionally translated books from English, including R. Chandler's detective novels in noir style.
Vian was a very passionate person, and his main passion was jazz. If we digress for a moment from his literary heritage, we have to admit that he was more of a jazzman than a writer. Just as, for example, Griboyedov was actually a diplomat, and not a playwright writer. But the descendants of this, of course, do not care.
Chairs in the evening, on the table in the morning
In 1947, an aircraft broke the sound barrier for the first time in the United States. In the same year, the sick Boris Vian in France overcame the literary barrier by writing "Foam of Days". Albert Camus' contemporary Plague was (much more than the drearily speculative The Plague!) a good muscular slap in the face of modern society. It was wonderful: Vian proclaimed a new ideal, a new philosophy of life, proclaimed life. But then he somehow managed to step on the throat of his own song and silence his own cry of the soul.
Vian was not a good PR manager himself. As I said, he tried to sit on three chairs, one of which was jazz, the second - his real "shednerv" (Vianovsky neologism) - the famous novel "Foam of Days" (1946), which during the life of the writer went catastrophically unnoticed, and his second-rate (if not third-rate!) boulevard novels stylized as noir a la Raymond Chandler, whom Vian translated, these demonic novels of his, published under the pseudonym Vernon Sullivan: “I will come to spit on your graves” (1946), “All the Dead of the same color" (1947), "Destroy all freaks" (1948) and "Women do not understand" (1950). As it is already clear from the titles of the works of the noir cycle, they are complete obscenity, unworthy of reading, and one cannot help but be convinced of this when reading.
These books were written for money, not inspiration (like Foam...), and they really brought Vian a lot of money (along with fame), and also hopelessly undermined his reputation. They also caused one real murder: under the influence of the novel "I'll come to spit ..." salesman Edmond Rouget strangled his girlfriend and decorated the corpse with a volume of Sullivan, opened at the scene of the murder. And finally, with a high degree of probability it can be assumed that the ill-fated novels were the cause of Vian's own sudden and ambiguous death. Having published his disgusting black bestsellers splattering blood (and sperm!) Vian, this refined, sublime personality, this "enthusiastic buffalo", as his friends called him, successfully crossed out "Foam of Days" and became famous throughout the country as a scandalous tabloid scribbler, and not like a genius who created "Foam of the Days", which is now included in the school curriculum! Written as a mockery of society, the novels "laughed" at Vian himself. No one realized that this was just a bad joke (least of all Edmond Rouget, poor fellow!), And Vian choked in his own bloody "foam of days." And for sure, after all, a sick heart whispered to him: “Boris, you are wrong, don’t write a bestseller.” But Boris didn't listen...
We are all sick
In our country, which adds humor to the unfunny situation that has arisen, Vian's blackish novels are not as famous as The Foam of Days. And it’s very funny to watch how, in the refraction of criticism (as if by turning the name inside out), Boris Vian for some reason imperceptibly (smoke into the house, lady into mother) turns into “naive syrup”. The words “protracted childhood”, “escapism”, “superficiality”, “puppet heroes”, etc. are heard. So much has already been said about the “sensory space” of Foam of Days! Critics see word-creation and rose-colored glasses, but they do not see the violent destruction of the world. But the hero of "Natural Born Killers" also wore rose-colored glasses! At best, Vian is compared to Kharms. Of course, they are both extraordinary gentlemen. But they are as different as Jekyll and Hyde! Where Kharms' laughter stops, maddening chaos immediately falls, "further - silence." And “Foam of Days” is a sad, but full of faith in a better tomorrow “spring song”.
Like the characters in the classic fairy tale by K. Graham "The Wind in the Willows" in the chapter Piper at the Gates of Dawn (famous thanks to Pink Floyd's debut album), the characters of "Foam ..." seemed to hear a transcendent, divine melody. And when she fell silent, they continue to live, but on a different level, in a different capacity. Like Neo, who has been in the matrix and beyond. No matter how tragic the story told in "Foam of Days", this sadness, like Pushkin's, is bright. Colin and Chloe as Romeo and Juliet. Born for each other, found their love. They can die without regret, as befits true karma partisans. Kharms - Russian hopelessness, Mozart's Requiem on the drainpipe flute, Vian - the new hope of the galaxy, black jazz in the corner of his mouth. Kharms - Game over, Vian - Mission Complete.
Pink Floyd's first album, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, is named after one of the chapters in Kenneth Graham's The Wind in the Willows. In this chapter, the heroes of the fairy tale Mole and Otter spend the night by the river in search of the lost Otter cub. Quote: “He might not have dared raise his head, but although the music had already died down, the call still sounded imperiously inside him. He could not help but look, even if death itself instantly and rightly struck him for looking with mortal eyes at the innermost, which should remain a secret. He obeyed and raised his head, and then, in the pure rays of the inevitably approaching dawn, when even Nature herself, painted in an embarrassingly pink color, fell silent, holding her breath, he looked into the eyes of the Friend and Helper, the one who played the flute.
Yes, the happiness of Vian’s heroes, immersed up to their necks in their own “matrix in a matrix” (such a bright matryoshka, a cozy pocket in an uncomfortable reality), transiently. But can the contemporary society (and us) with its proven traditional values give a person lasting happiness?! A sick, sensitive heart - his impeccable muse - told Vian that no. His doomed heart scribbled in his brain, as if on a typewriter: "No, no, no..." endless search for the ideal - freedom...
This is not art for art's sake, this is a declaration of man's independence from society! This is a promise of happiness in a single body, and not somewhere in a bright future, painted in bright poster colors by propaganda, in a future that never comes. Contrary to narrow-minded criticism (which missed the "Foam of Days" and did not appreciate the comic humor of trash novels!), Vian's characters are extremely, to the point of physiology, like Tomas from Milan Kundera's "The Unbearable Lightness of Being", are real. And realistic. They just live in the "real present" - the eternal present, in which only youth and life are possible, they live not even today, but in the present moment: "do not think about seconds down..." Almost like Taoist sages.
Good morning last hero
Vian does not see with his eyes, he sees with his third eye a kind of transcendental “beam of light in the dark kingdom”, divided into a whole rainbow of colors, and draws with these colors, although this light comes from a star that has died out and cooled down a million years ago. And hence the cosmic sadness, as in the poems of Juan Ramon Jimenez, and despair, and even somewhere enlightened cruelty, as in the songs of Tsoi, who foresaw a lot: “My sun, look at me: / My palm has turned into a fist, / And if there is gunpowder, / Give me fire. / Like this". Vian, whose health had been hanging by a thread since adolescence, burned all the gunpowder that he had. He played the trumpet in defiance of the doctors, loved beautiful women and New Orleans jazz... And he didn't give a damn about everything he didn't like.
Vian lived according to the samurai code: while admiring the shamelessly blooming sakura from the balcony of his ivory tower, he, without outside help, remembered that “this too shall pass”, realized and put into practice the inevitability and disgust of his own death. For him, death was at arm's length. Hence the strange ruthlessness mixed with daydreaming: like the writer, athlete, samurai, gay Yukio Mishima, who made himself hara-kiri after a crazy attempt to restore the emperor. Vian also wanted something of the sort, beyond, he wanted war with everything and everyone. Vian was not a pacifist, as is commonly believed, rather he was a "peanut anarchist", a karma partisan with Pelevin's "clay machine gun" hidden in his sleeve!
This hypothetical machine gun (or, according to Vian, "heartbreaker") up his sleeve was at the same time his ace up his sleeve, his only wild card that could bring victory to Vian, him, the doomed core, the doomed loser. Hence his susceptibility to the most visionary depth, otherwise it would not be worth reading.
P.S. Ay-ay-ay, they killed a black man ...
Vian was a true Jedi, albeit in the reserve for health reasons. Perhaps it was precisely because of this "in reserve" that he gradually accumulated a critical mass of malice in his soul ... The demons of Vian, so cute at the beginning (already flashed in the "Foam of Days" somewhere in the episodes), matured, grew terrible horns and with Volodarsky laughter tore the withered angels to shreds... Jekyll gave way to Hyde. This is how his life turned out - quickly, like a house of cards.
According to Vian, life is a chaos in which it is impossible to survive, you can only enjoy, no matter what it costs, right now. Death is guaranteed to everyone, life is not guaranteed to anyone. The enjoyment of life is taken away by compromises, the masses, labor, regime, oblivion. And about death, what it will be, one can only guess. Vian partially predicted his own death in the poem “Death Attempt” (translated by D. Svintsov):
I will die from a ruptured aorta.
There will be a special kind of evening -
Moderately sensual, warm and clear
And terrible.
As you can see, even Vian, generously endowed with an unhealthy imagination, could not imagine that he would die in a completely non-sensual morning, but on a full stomach after breakfast, and yet his whole sick life hinted at some such indigestible outcome!
Score: 10
A bit crazy, undoubtedly visionary and in some places a stunningly brilliant thing, revealing an amazing fan of meanings. Immediately striking is the slightly surrealistic style of Vian's writing, the incredible richness of the text with colors, images and sounds. Perhaps, for a long time I have not regretted so much that I do not know French: it seems to me that the puns invented by the translators are just the tip of the iceberg, hiding the puzzling linguistic twists of the original. Absolutely crazy things Vian says with a hilariously serious face. The author invites us to admire the play of the sun's rays on the mosaic of stained-glass windows, to taste a cocktail from Duke Ellington's improvisations, to talk with a talking mouse that lives in the hero's bathroom. Approximately here the pastoral-touching love story begins, everyone laughs and dances. The reader is fascinated, and nothing portends trouble.
And here comes the turning point. The love story turns into a sad tale of death and sacrifice. Happiness, laughter and light flow out of the lives of the heroes, like air from a punctured balloon. The world shrinks, the colors fade, the sounds of jazz become dull and indistinct. A cute parody of Sartre becomes an evil mockery, a mouse from the bathroom erases the lakpi into blood, Chloe falls ill and is about to die. Colorful surrealism develops into grotesque, mountains of corpses pile up, duplicity and materialism triumph, cold metal rebels against living human warmth. And with all this, the same seriousness, the same incredible imagery and fantasy, the same ability to draw a lively, convex face of tragedy with a couple of strokes, infinitely far from hackneyed phrases and clichés. The collapse of the hopes of the heroes in strength and expression is not inferior to the pictures of their own recent happiness, and the most pretentious author's constructions are not able to hide from us the cruel reality of what is happening. Perhaps this is even worse than Vian's phantasmagoric horror stories. In short, the book is damn good. I don’t even remember where else the banal horrors of everyday life are shown with such visual power. An amazing novel, so unusual and so alive that one can only sigh in admiration.
Score: 10
Boris Vian. Jazz critic, musician, poet, science fiction writer. Prone to outrageous, infamous writer, who became a classic after his death.
"Foam of Days" is a book that harmoniously combines the incongruous in the most paradoxical way: it is both frivolous and deep, sad and life-affirming.
Vian's favorite technique is the visualization of a worn out speech stamp, the transfer of a phraseological unit from the level of language to the level of the artistic reality of the book ("Brilliantly performing the swallow, she reaped the laurels, and meanwhile the cleaner swept away the bay leaves scattered in all directions"). However, fate played a cruel joke with Vian, using his own calling card as a weapon. The writer, with his death, realized the metaphor of "a murderous film adaptation", having died of a heart attack during the premiere of a film based on his novel "I'll come to spit on your graves." In general, he was unlucky in life. His literary hoax turned into a terrible scandal, and the prize for young authors, for which the "Foam of Days" was written, was unexpectedly awarded to a far from beginning writer.
"Foam of Days" is a sad tale about love. The novel is built on the principle of contrast: the reader can follow how the style of presentation and language changes from chapter to chapter, turning from light, flying into oppressive and gloomy. The bright colors of the first chapters gradually fade, in the finale a black and white picture appears before the mind's eye. As darkness envelops the heroes' apartment, the space of the book seems to shrink; the floor merges with the ceiling, fresh flowers wither and turn to dust.
Of particular note is the unique humor of Vian. Perhaps you have never read such a talented and elegant banter in your life. Vian parodies everything that can turn into a cliché, all the fashionable hobbies of the French youth of the forties: jazz, surrealism, existentialism ... Existentialism got the most. “The problem of choice for nausea on especially thick toilet paper”, “Vomit volume bound in stink skin” will be remembered for a long time by the reader familiar with the work of Jean Sol Partre, ugh! Jean Paul Sartre.
Score: 10
The most real story, wrapped in a cloak of unreality and permeated with true feelings that make you think differently and see things as they really are.
The beginning of the book, permeated with light, music, happiness and the belief that each new day will bring something more good, is compressed to one endlessly pulsing note of despair in the inflamed brain of the protagonist at the end of this work.
Very few books make us think about something in this life. This book makes you not only think, but feel every word and every gesture of the characters.
I read "Foam of Days" one single time and a very long time ago. I never even tried to read it again precisely because the book is simply indescribable and you realize that it is very difficult to relive all its events again. And one moment you will never feel again - you will not be able to regain the original feeling of joy from the discovery and realization that such a book exists.
Score: 10
Cinema novel.
He swung at it for a long time, and only the premiere of the film of the same name by Michel Gondry (himself a rare master: “Science of Sleep”, “Rewind”, “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind”) that collapsed in the summer made me cling to the source of the original text.
The level of visionary - now I will mix two mutually inappropriate, but mutually reinforcing concepts into a piano cocktail: visionary and visualization - simply beyond.
Undoubtedly, it is worth adding the deepest kinesthetic (again, in two layers: touching and disgusting in touch) and lightness. Vian does not write, he smokes and writes this text with the thinnest feathers of fragrant tobacco smoke.
It was on the example of this work of the pen that Vianov was able to formulate for himself the difference between fantastic and human literature:
The first kneels before the idea (the same principle: tear out the root of the fantasy assumption, and the whole sprout will wither)
The second can flirt with unrealistic details as much as you like, but it tells about a person, feelings and relationships, essentially telling a kind of proto-story, like the expulsion of Adam and Eve from Eden
Score: 8
Holding a 270-page book in my hands, I was involuntarily upset because of the hard-earned money torn out by publishers, as usual. Imagine my surprise when I came across a story similar to Alice in Wonderland. Here you will not meet the dynamics of the plot. Rather, it is a mixture of gourmet food, jazz, blues. There is a place for religion - endlessly ridiculed by Vian. (I later found out with what contempt the author treats the church).
The six main characters of the book, around which splashes life, saturated with magic. I don’t know how to say it exactly, but I think this is the same magical realism. Colin is a rich young man who wants to fall in love with no memory. Chic is his poor best friend, who fanatically collects things and books by Jean-Sol Partre (the play on words is obvious - Vian creates a parody of Sartre). Beautiful girls Aliza and Isis. Nicolas is a divine cook who works for Colin and is his friend. And finally, a wonderful, dreamy girl Chloe. It is around Chloe that the whole plot will play. The main musical theme of the book is the work "Chloe" blues arranged by Duke Ellington. Chloe and Colin's wedding, their crazy love, her illness.
The atmosphere of this graceful, gloomy and tragic story captivates and does not let go. Excellent language and style.
Score: 10
A young man named Colin longs to fall in love. And falls in love - with a girl named Chloe. They get married, but Chloe falls ill, and Colin does everything to help Chloe recover.
The main characters, like the story itself, are superficial. Moreover, they are not at all attractive. Colin, squandering his fortune, incapable of working, an infantile, Chloe, a typical fairy girl, Colin Nicolas's servant, who does not miss a single skirt, and apparently suffers from something like a split personality, their comrade Chic, an obsessive who spends all his money on books Jean-Sol Partre (such a fat allusion to one well-known philosopher), how some modern audiophiles collect releases from their favorite bands, Shika's girlfriend Aliza, allowing Shika to do this and showing unambiguous signs of attention to Kolen ... well, and someone else from characters were in the novel? Oh yes. Mouse. Here she is - the most adequate and pleasant character in the book.
I fully admit that in the original, in French, the novel may turn out to be much more impressive - after all, language games are difficult to translate, but in the form in which the book is presented to the Russian-speaking reader now, it, unfortunately, does not represent anything unusual. Just a story of one failed love with a touch of surrealism and a Duke Ellington soundtrack. Literally a couple of hours after reading, nothing remains in my head - to write this review, I even had to pick up the book again and flip through it. Thankfully, it's quite short.
Score: 5
Look around and you will notice how life is seething around with all its splendor, foaming and playing. And waking up every day, imagine that you have a mouse dancing under the rays of bright suns, which, in which case, will give everything, just to help at the moment when everything goes to hell. And you should probably listen, then you will hear the crackle of foaming life.
Before us is a world of quirks, absurdities and implausibility, but it frightens with its reality so much that you want to get lost like a needle in a haystack. And it smells good, and no one can get me there. The world of absurdities that will never happen to anyone at the same time shows people like us, with the same problems, dreams and aspirations. A world where human warmth is given to the cold metal of weapons, in which young people want love, not work; someone gives the last money for obsession, not noticing and rejecting the most valuable thing.
The novel, which begins with light and bright colors, ends with dimmed light and hopelessness. All heroes ultimately have tragic fates. In this foam of days around us there are those who, perhaps, lack a little mouse that can change their being. Or incapable. This is a love story so tragic that no surrealism with its unusual images can weaken the weight of unhappy love that crushed the main characters. Gradually the rooms shrink, the windows grow overgrown, the tiles turn into wood, and the suns dim. What is this? No, it's different for everyone.
Everything is over. All destinies unraveled and cleared up. But then the same mouse appears, showing in the last lines the quintessence of all life ...
Score: 9
"Gently, gently, subtly, subtly..."
In general, an unusually elegant and chaste love story :smile: Probably similar to the incredible music of the piano :smile: And yet too frivolous. Later, lines from Begbeder's essay "The Best Books of the 20th Century" came across
“Surely there are people who do not like The Foam of Days, who find this book too naive or frivolous, and I want to solemnly announce to them right here, these people, that I feel sorry for them, because they did not understand the most important thing in literature. Want to know what it is? Charm." Brrr - and this is about me:eek: Despite all the admiration for the wonderful fantasy, the extraordinary lightness and charm of the story ... It didn’t leave, some looming in the depths of consciousness, irritation from the complete sloppiness, nihilism, and selfishness of the heroes of existence, which resembles the notorious fable Krylova
Score: 3
