Vian, Boris (1920-59). French novelist, playwright, poet, jazz musician and critic, song-writer and singer (‘Le Déserteur’, 1954), frequenter of Saint-Germain-des-Prés. He was an anti- Existentialist, though closely linked with Sartre and Les Temps modernes, and a member of the Collège de 'Pataphysique from 1952. Vian wrote lively plays in a proto- Absurdist vein, notably Les Bâtisseurs d'empire (1959), but his greatest literary achievement lies in his novels: Vercoquin et le Plancton (written 1943-4, published 1947), L'Écume des jours (1947), a sad, sentimental love-story with a disconcerting logic and beauty of its own (satirizing incidentally, and rather obviously, Jean-Sol Partre and his fans); L'Automne à Pékin (also 1947), which describes a journey to Exopotamia, and relates, more cynically, another story of impossible love; finally, L'Herbe rouge (1950), a personal view of childhood which reappears in L'Arrache-cœur (1953), a story of possessive maternal love. Vian was also the author of four novels published under the pen-name of Vernon Sullivan, including J'irai cracher sur vos tombes (1946), a pastiche, purporting to be a translation from the American, written in ten days and resulting in a conviction for pornography. Vian is irreverent, iconoclastic, provocative; he is also linguistically and lyrically inventive with a gift for satire, Surrealist fantasy, and a refined sense of logical absurdity.

[Peter Sharratt]

The New Oxford Companion to Literature in French. Copyright © 1995, 2005 by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.