Boris Vian is as enigmatic as his novels are. Somewhat of renaissance man, he has dabbled in music, film, literature and even engineering. Outside of France, his reputation is obscure and I wouldn’t have picked him up myself if I didn’t come across his short stories while I was learning French. I remembered the cold brutality of reading Les Fourmis. When I was an exchange student in France, I picked up secondhand his books L’Arrache-Coeur and L’Herbe Rouge. The former I’ve always picked up but never finished. My French wasn’t good enough. The second I picked up only last year so I can get back into the mastery of the language again.
Maybe as a non-native French speaker, it’s not an easy task to understand what the HAYLLEEE is going on, because the worlds that Vian constructed are almost surreal, yet grounded. This is the world where the grass is red, dogs speak more intelligently than your average Gen Z and rationalise their existence, the skies are reachable and engineers work for machines with ambiguous purposes. The machine in question takes the hero back to some time in the past, where psychiatric-like figures try to delve into his thoughts as he discourses. It is a strange book. Kafkaesque doesn’t even cut it.
And at the end of it, I still don’t know what to make out of it. I felt a bit exasperated, not only because I had to deal in a language not my own, but that the ending felt as offbeat as the entire book is. But I found some of the scenes fantastic, as when Lazuli, the second in command, were fighting against phantom ghosts, and the enlightened conversation with the talking dog who had no more need to rationalise because he had found his purpose.
