Customer Reviews

Credit to an overlooked classic! - By: , 29 Sep 2001
Like many readers, I am always looking for that special gem which will change my perceptions of the world. When I stumbled upon this book, I realised I had found it.

Boris Vian takes a poignant, delicate love story, places it inside another dimension & turns it inside out. This is a world of Surrealism where an ordinary romantic jauntin an ice-rink can turn into a casual bloodbath; where the protaganist's luxury apartment literally shrinks according to mood. At times it turns from the head-spinningly sentimental to the queasily obscene, just like the greatest Surrealist art. It comes across like a Pop Art take on the world of Kafka. The most touching scenes of the mouse perserveringin vain to shine the floor (he returns to bed wearing bandaged hands) or Chick trying to make ends meet by taking on a jobin which he must tell people bad news the day before it arrives (to the understandable displeasure of the recipients) will stay with you forever.

Boris Vian was a writer, jazz-player & friend of Jean Pulse Heatre. (as he is knownin the novel) He died while viewing the controversial cinematic adaption of his novel 'I Spit on Your Grave' - it's sad that he'll be mostly remembered for this rather than this wonderful, gravely overlooked novel. No-one else could have created this singular fantasy veering perfectly from quirky cool to arrestingly tragic.