VIAN, Boris

(1920-1959)

   French writer in various genres, his collected works amounting to more than 50 vols; he was Transcendental Satrap of the College de 'Pataphysique, and a fine dramatist of the absurd (FABULATION)who will be perhaps best remembered for his songs (MUSIC) and for such plays as Equarrissage pour tous (1950; trans Simon Watson Taylor as The Knackers' ABC 1968 US), which savagely mocks the military mind andmilitary punctilio, and Les Batisseurs d'Empire ou le Schmurz (1959; trans Simon Watson Taylor as The Empire Builders 1962 UK), a surreal excursusupon pain. One of the main personalities of the post-WWII French sf scene - though sf made up only a small part of his activities - BV translatedwriters like A.E. VAN VOGT, William TENN, Henry KUTTNER and Ray BRADBURY, and was himself a writer of speculative fiction years ahead of his time. His first novel, J'irai cracher sur vos tombes (1946 as by VernonSullivan; trans BV and Milton Rosenthal as I Spit on your Graves 1948 as BV), pretended with some success to be a US tough-guy detective novel, and extended only peripherally into the fantastic. But the stories assembled in Les Fourmis (coll 1949; trans Julia Older as Blues for a Black Cat 1992 US) were deeply indebted to sf and Surrealism, as were his later novels,particularly L'Ecume des jours (1947; trans Stanley Chapman as Froth on the Daydream 1967 UK; vt Mood Indigo 1968 US), L'automne a Pekin ("Autumn in Peking") (1947), a desert utopia set in an ALTERNATE WORLD, L'herbe rouge ("Red Grass") (1950), a surreal tale which mixes TIME TRAVEL and nostalgia, and L'Arrache-Coeur (1953; trans Stanley Chapman as Heartsnatcher 1968 UK), a fable of metamorphosis. Throughout his career,BV used sf devices to articulate a sense of the world's violent impingement on the self, though sometimes his characters transcended their shackles; in the 1960s his work was particularly influential on writers of the UK NEW WAVE.

   JC/MJ

   See also: FRANCE.