When Boris Vian’s “L’Écume des jours” was published in France in the aftermath of WW2, it did not attract the hoped-for success, perhaps because of its extreme surrealist and absurdist nature. Yet since then, it has been made into a film and widely translated, with several English titles: “Froth on the Daydream”, Foam of the Daze” and “Mood Indigo”, the latter reflecting its frequent references to the music of Duke Ellington. It’s also become a staple of the French education system – I find it hard to imagine most teenagers enjoying it, but have been assured that it goes down well with them, and adult French acquaintances recall with pleasure the “pianocktail”, one of the many words Vian loved to make up – an imaginary invention of his, having trained as an engineer, for a piano which could produce cocktails to match the jazz music played on it.

While intrigued by the surrealism in the paintings of say, Magritte or Dali, in fiction it can be irritating. In the opening pages, we encounter Colin, a wealthy “Bertie Wooster”-type young man, with Jeeves in the form of his faithful chef Nicolas. As he checks his face in the mirror, his blackheads rapidly disappear back under his skin. As he enters the kitchen, the resident mice are dancing to the sound of the sun’s rays as they hit the brass taps. Nicolas is making pâté from the eels which have been lured from these taps by bananas, enabling him to cut off their heads and pull them out.

Somewhat jealous of his impecunious friend Chick’s relationship with his girlfriend Alise, whom Colin rather fancies, he sets out to remedy the situation by falling immediately in love with a beautiful, feminine but rather two-dimensional girl called Chloé, after Duke Ellington’s arrangement of “Chloé-Song of the Swamp”. Vian’s obsession with American jazz gets rather repetitive….

The main thread of the novel turns out to be a love story, set against an initially idyllic background, which, as Colin begins to lose his money and therefore freedom of action, sinks rapidly into a sombre and depressing world, filled with sickness, death and murder. As a symbol of this, his apartment contracts dramatically in size over time.

There are some striking scenes, and intriguing new words like “doublezon” for a unit of money, “biglemoi” for a type of dance and “arrache-coeur” for a particulary horrible weapon. (I’m not sure how translators deal with these!)

I disliked the incidents of excessive casual violence, particularly when involving the characters apparently intended to be “the good guys”. For instance, when Colin is anxious to leave a skating rink quickly because he believes that Chloé has fallen ill, he kills an assistant by striking him with his skate. The victim falls onto a switch, causing a power cut, and Colin leaves with no compunction or punishment.

Apart from the fact that I could learn some French from reading this quirky twaddle, what kept me reading was the fact that by chance I had bought a text designed for French students. This included an interesting biography of Vian in the context of the intellectual environment in post-war France, including the influence of Jean-Paul Sartre who is pilloried in the novel as Jean Sol-Partre, probably in revenge because Vian’s wife had an affair with him, thus destroying their marriage. There were also a lot of footnotes to help with otherwise obscure allusions. But I could not agree that the dominant theme was “l’humour”.

Opinion in my book group was evenly divided. On one hand were those who delighted in the originality of Vian’s ideas, which perhaps is one reason for making French teenagers study the novel, along with the issues it raises over the effects of the negative “norms” of society such as excessive consumerism, religious corruption and hypocrisy, repression by those in power, and the alienating effects of some forms of labour. On the other side were those like me who found the absurdism excessive, to the extent of detracting from the book’s intended messages. For instance, Vian portrays the tedium of some forms of labour by describing how Colin is reduced to lying for hours on earth which has become sterile, so that his human warmth is required to germinate and grow a dozen cylinders into guns…..he will only be paid if they have no deformity, like crooked barrels….!

I remain an admirer of Vian’s trumpet-playing, particularly when combined with his powerful anti-war poem “Le Déserteur”.

See YouTube Le Déserteur (Remastered)