When I was a teenager, Boris Vian was my favourite author. I collected his books – I have 41- and had a photo of him on my bedroom wall right next to Charles Baudelaire. I loved him because he was a very versatile person. He was a writer, a poet, a musician, a singer, a translator and many more things. I loved his sense of humour and the way he manipulated the language, I still love it of course!

Boris Vian was born in 1920 and died of a heart attack in 1959.  He had always suffered ill health and knew that he would die at a young age. He was good friend with Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus with whom he like spending time in the Café des Deux Magots in Saint-Germain des Prés in Paris.

During his lifetime Boris Vian was not a very successful author and musician. It is only after his death that his work gained the recognition that it deserved.

One of his most famous novels L’Ecume des Jours, (Froth on the Daydream) published in 1947, was made into a film– bizarrely translated  Mood Indigo –  in 2013. It tells the surrealist and poetic story of a man who falls in love with a young woman pretending to be the reincarnation of a Duke Ellington song.

One of his  most famous short stories is entitled Les Fourmis (The Ants / Pins and Needles). It was published in 1949 and is written from the point of view of a young American soldier who describes the D-day landing in Normandy on 6 June 1944.  Vian’s black humour is present from the first sentence of the story:

On est arrivés ce matin et on a pas été bien reçus, car il y avait que des tas de types morts ou des tas de morceaux de types, de tanks et de camions démolis.

We arrived this morning and we didn’t get a nice welcome because there were piles of dead guys or piles of parts of dead guys, tanks and smashed up trucks. 

Internationally, Boris Vian is mainly known for his song Le Déserteur, an anti-war song released in 1954 when France was in the midst of the First Indochina War.  The song  later became famous in the United states during the protests against the Vietnam War when it was sung by Joan Baez.

Here are the French lyrics with English translation:

I hope you have enjoyed this little introduction to Boris Vian. As always, if you want to find out more, there is a lot of information on the internet.