L’Écume des jours
My admission that Boris Vian’s L’Écume des jours (Froth on the Daydream) is my favourite book has often raised eyebrows. This 1947 novel is a classic mandatory back-to school read for French pupils, but is rarely considered a part of the adult canon.
There is, indeed, something very naïve about depictions in L’Écume des jours – a rich-boy-loves-cute-girl trope with an absurdist twist. Vian, a talented engineering graduate, was a major author of the “pataphysics” movement, an ill-defined school of absurdist writing whose very existence parodied the pretentious literary circles of the time.
Vian portmanteaus, deforms, and invents a Shakespearian quantity of words—the edition I own ends with a four-page glossary of neologisms—often to a comical or childish effect. A literal pink cloud accompanies the protagonist Colin and his lover Chloé as they walk hand-in-hand, and cancer becomes a water lily rooted in one’s lung.
Brutal passages also surprise the reader. In a typical magical-realism fashion, people suddenly die in the middle of a scene, to no one’s concern. And the novel ends tragically, unexpectedly, with ruin and death. At once, poverty and illness wreck the pink clouds of love and indolence of the bourgeoisie.
The invented phrases, sudden shifts in mood and tone, and innovative style echo a recurring theme of L’Écume des jours: jazz. Vian was an avid trumpeter and singer, authoring witty jazz standards alongside his career as a novelist. Colin’s love interest, Chloé, shares the name of one of Duke Ellington’s most famous jazz standards. This leads to an awkward first encounter with Colin, himself a nervous jazz nerd. “‘Good ev… Are you arranged by Duke Ellington?’” he asks, before fleeing with “the conviction of having said something stupid.”
Almost accidentally, as an afterthought between its disconcerting style and social critique, L’Écume des jours presents one of literature’s most heartfelt depictions of love. Affected romance as portrayed in some classical novels will never be relatable to me. Yet, against expectations, the simple dialogues of L’Écume des jours and their interruption by zany digressions, ring a truer bell.
