L`écume des jours

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)