"The essential thing in life is to give a priori judgments about everything. In fact, it seems that the masses are always in the wrong, and that individuals are always right. However, it should be careful not to infer any rule of conduct from this observation that certain rules need not be made to run. Only two things matter: love, in all its forms, with pretty girls, and the music of New Orleans or Duke Ellington. The rest would better to disappear, because the rest is ugly, and the evidence contained in the few following pages is derived all its power from a single fact: the story is entirely true, because I have invented me from head to toe ... "(Boris Vian, New Orleans March 10, 1946)
I would like to thank Anna and Nicola for introducing me to this masterpiece, "The Foam of Days" by Boris Vian . This novel is about love and passion, friendship and company, is a surreal and unconventional novel, still in the original style and form, is like a song "jazz" pure and unique every time you listen. As shown in many translator's notes to fully appreciate this would be better to read the novel ("listen") in his native language, French.
From the cover:
Colin is a young Parisian rich and bored. Pass the time devoted to recipes incredible, bizarre strumming instruments of his own, hanging out with Chick - his best friend - an engineer and penniless sperperone that has a strange ball: collecting the works of Jean-Sol Partre. Then, in the life of the gentleman comes in, so explosive, love. The encounter with the beautiful Chloe is a stroke of lightning: they decided to get married in a few days. Come back from their honeymoon, Chloe gets sick. In his lungs lurks a terrible illness, is struggling to breathe. As time is always faster, and the apartment where they live, monumental in size initially, is getting closer ...
