Hegel's laughing

[Paul Mackin]

On Thu, 3 Aug 2000, James Kyllo wrote:

> Thomas Eckhardt asked:
> 
> > Perhaps the question is whether English translations of Vian's novels
> > were available in the US during the 50s/60s. Paul? Neil?
> 
> Paul Mackin replied:
> 
> >I would say No. In the 50s Sartre was widely read in the U.S. in
> >translation.  Also Camus's The Plague, The Stranger, The Fall.
> >deBeauvoir also. I know I didn't know about Vian.
> 
> However - it seems they were available, but in disguise.  I went to Amazon,
> to see whether I could buy any Vian ... and this is what I found:
> 
> "As unlikely as it may seem, America was somewhat 'in' for the French after
> World War II; the prewar renown of Hemingway and Faulkner was giving way to
> the novels of Cheyney and Cain, and film noir heroes such as Humphrey Bogart
> had unknowingly joined forces with the rising stars of French
> existentialism. The sex-and-violence pulp novel to have the biggest impact,
> however, was 'I Spit on Your Graves' by a certain Vernon Sullivan, whose
> existentialism came short of actually allowing him to exist. He was the pen
> name of Boris Vian, jazz musician, song-writer and author, whose best-known
> novel (translated as Froth on the Daydream in Britain, and Mood Indigo in
> the U.S.) would later be described by Raymond Queneau as 'the most beautiful
> love story ever written.' If that was to be the most beautiful, however,
> then this, his literary debut, was without question one of the ugliest - a
> brutal sex-and-murder revenge story to outdo even Charles Willeford at his
> worst.
> 
> A lawsuit against indecency and a copy of the novel (with aptly-circled
> passages) found in a hotel room by the strangled body of a business-man1s
> mistress did wonders for the book's sales, but Vian's subsequent translation
> of the book into its 'original' English failed to maintain his anonymity. It
> did, however, make this text available to the English reader, even if it
> took 50 years for it to now see print in the States."

Oh, that "I spit on your grave." Was a 70s movie also called Day of the
Woman. Stories sound similar. Sex and revenge.

			P.