The Great French hipster gets an English translation from TamTam Books and it’s sort of like James Ellroy on acid dropped into a Looney Tunes cartoon version of The Island of Doctor Moreau.
Boris Vian’s 1948 anti-noir novel, To Hell With the Ugly, just got a new English translation from Vian peddler TamTam Books. And what becomes apparent rather immediately is that Vian, the Great French hipster and man about Paris, created a novel with the violent noir tendencies of James Ellroy, but dipped in acid and dropped in a Looney Tunes cartoon version of H. G. Wells’ The Island of Doctor Moreau.
As I noted in Volume 3 of my “Cabinet of Subversive Books” here on Death and Taxes, “I was introduced to Boris Vian [by] Tosh Berman, who has long been a champion of Vian’s work here in America… commissioning the translation of many of the author’s novels—’Autumn in Peking,’ ‘I Spit On Your Graves,’ [and] ‘The Dead All Have the Same Skin.’”
In Volume 3 of “Cabinet,” I took a brief look at Vian’s signature novel Foam of the Daze, a surreal work of art that elevates the dandy to a sort of idol, in which flowers grow inside of people, houses darken and collapse onto their inhabitants, musical instruments mix drinks based on musical numbers, and neckties revolt against those who wear them.
I noted that “The way the characters act and interact anticipated both the unbound, Byronic wanderings of the Beats and their writings as well as the ’60s counter-culture in both France and America.”
It was an influence on the May 1968 movement in Paris, inspiring everyone from Guy Debord and the Situationists, to Serge Gainsbourg and Jean-Luc Godard. Its effect is still powerful and felt in many counter-cultural sectors to this day.
But, To Hell With the Ugly is an altogether different beast. Where Foam of the Daze is melancholy and sublime, To Hell With the Ugly is out of control and depraved—an absurd, violent, psycho-sexual mess.
I can’t go too far into the plot for fear of ruining the experience, but what can be said is that an extremely physically-fit 19 year old Southern Californian named Rock Bailey—whose one goal is to preserve his virginity until the age of 20—is drugged, kidnapped and forced to deposit his sperm first in a woman, then into a container after he refuses to yield his virginity to the lady.
His oath becomes increasingly difficult as the novel progresses and is the catalyst for many adventures, or rather misadventures that follow.
There is a very hard-boiled, James Ellroy brand of noir vibe to Rock’s narration in the beginning, but it rather quickly gives way to more surreal vistas, which is where Vian merges his love of Tex Avery “Looney Tunes” with H. G. Wells’ science fiction.
As surreal as it gets, though, one could almost imagine the fiction of this plot becoming reality one day (if not already), though Rock’s narration and his character’s actions always remain firmly planted in the land of fiction, as though Vian were winking at his readers as if to say, “Isn’t this fun?”
Head over to TamTam Books to find out where you can buy a copy.
