Word: vian
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...Vian's heroes live unperturbed in a world where broken windows heal themselves, where clouds smell of wild thyme or cinnamon sugar, and where a rectangular bedroom becomes spherical when "The Mood to Be Wooed" is played. If we find these anomalies disconcerting, it is because, as Jacques Bens points out in his afterward to the French edition, we are used to fairytales where the supernatural of flying carpets or seven-league boots is inserted in an otherwise normal world. In Vian, on the other hand, the symbolic "pianocktail," which allows one to get literally drunk on jazz, is placed...
...VIAN maintains a kind of baroque humor throughout, but puns and word games (unfortunately badly translated) shade into black humor which at the novel's end becomes a Kafkaesque surrealism that we find frightening rather than funny. Sartre, who was a real-life friend of Vian's, is amusingly satirized as Jean-Sol Partre, the cult idol who enters packed lecture halls on elephant back, crushing his waiting fans. But when Chick, Colin's friend, sacrifices everything, including his girl-friend Alise, in order to buy Partre's work, the joke turns grisly. Chloe dies from a water-lily growing...
...love story itself is simple to the point of banality, but set in this strange, poetic universe it becomes unforgettable. Vian's language evokes both sensuality and a kind of fragile tenderness; Chloe's skin is "amber-colored and as appetizing as marzipan," but she coughs "like a piece of silk tearing." This delicacy is poignant in the second half of the novel, as Chloe and Colin become the innocent victims of an inexplicable determinism for which no one will take responsibility. At Chloe's grotesque, horrifying funeral, Colin cross-examines Jesus...
...Vian is not accusing religion of indifference so much as pointing out its irrelevance. What is relevant and important then? In his forward, Vian declares, "There are only two things: love, all sorts of live, with pretty girls, and the music of New Orleans or Duck Ellington. Everything else ought to go, because everything else is ugly. . . ." This is a flippantly stated philosophy, but the hedonistic note it sound accords well with Vian's own life-style. A cardiac case from childhood, Vian decided to ignore his illness with a vengeance. He was a jazz musician, a composer, an engineer...
...unlikely that Vian's novels will become particularly popular in this country: they're very French, and they suffer in translation. But Mood Indigo has a magic no heavy-handed translator can counteract. It's effective on so many levels that reading it is more than a pleasant pastime--it's like an initiation into Vian's way of responding to reality. And a very powerful one too: chances are that when you read your second Vian novel, it will be like coming home...