Froth on the Daydream

by Boris Vian

I first discovered Boris Vian in one of Alberto Manguel's "Black Water" collections of fantastic literature, which, incidentally, are two of the ten books I will take with me to the desert island when I go. They're big, fat books of short stories, selected for spookiness and beauty, and they've introduced me to some of my favourite writers over the years: Calvino, Borges, Kafka, Kenzaburo Oe... there's this achingly beautiful little story by Tennessee Williams called "The Mysteries of the Joy Rio", and a funny, sad, creepy thing by Bruno Schulz called "Father's Last Escape", and on and on...

So anyway, in - here it is, in Black Water 2, there's this story called "The Dead Fish", by Boris Vian, which I last read about five years ago, although I've read through the anthology probably half a dozen times since then, but here's the thing: I can't read this story, or talk about it, or even think about it all the way through, without bursting into embarrassingly copious weeping that lasts far longer than it should. I don't even know why, exactly; but when I was six years old, I read a story in which a dog at a barbecue "wanted (a hamburger) so badly that his nose started to run", and something about that phrase immersed me in a deep melancholy that lasted for hours, and I feel the same way when I read "The Dead Fish", only more so.

So when I realized that Vian had written a novel, it was not without considerable terror that I rushed out to get it. And while I sat and read it all in one sitting yesterday afternoon (I can do that sort of thing, I'm an adult now and there's no one around to stop me) (except my husband, but he was at work) I was bracing myself for the deluge of tears. Which never came.

This is not a condemnation of "Froth on the Daydream". It's a very sweet novel with a wonderful ending ("The voices of eleven little girls from the Orphanage of Pope John the Twentythird could be heard getting nearer. They were singing. And they were blind.") It makes me think that Vian must have been a delightful person - the biographical note backs this up: among other things, he was a jazz trumpeter and a cabaret singer, and his first novel was seized by the police "on moral grounds"; he died of a heart attack "while watching a film adaptation of this novel of which he did not approve". Alberto Manguel quotes Julio Cortazar as saying "I can't think of another writer who can move me as surreptitiously as Vian does", and I agree - the surrealist touches may seem a bit precious at first, but their necessity gradually becomes clear, and when Colin says "People don't change, things do", you can only nod.

I guess my only beef with this novel is that it's not "The Dead Fish"; and come to think of it, that's probably just as well.