Resumo de Foam Of The Daze, Original L'ecume Des Jours

Foam of the Daze is considered by many the authors? masterpiece. If not the case, it?s still undeniably the author's best-known and most widely discussed work. The French Boris Vian lived in the intellectually intense 19th century. He died in 1959 having just celebrated his 39th anniversary, but he lived long enough to have witnessed some of the most relevant cultural and artistic bursts in his hometown, Paris. That showed in his ecletism, as Vian was know as an engineer, inventor, chronicler of jazz, trumpet player, subversive, singer, not to mention poet and novelist.Foam of the Daze (the original title being L'Ecume des jours) was published in 1947. It is a unique novel, revealing itself as a deep and tender reading about love and life, even when hidden by a shy veil of apparent naivety. Its pages drip with passion, cries, laughter, and tears. It achieves being simultaneously romantic and nihilistic, fresh and dark, optimistic and decadent. It is genial in the way it blends the most light-hearted and playful fantasy with a sense of doom and tragedy, that has reached many readers across a wide range of ages and cultural backgrounds. It?s a fact it?s fame and recognition is widely more intense in France in Mediterranean countries, having staying barely known to English readers until a decade or two ago.It is a story about a group of young friends inhabiting Paris in the 50?s (although its never named, several references lead us to picture somewhere so close to Paris that it could only be Paris). The abundant references to jazz and existentialism lead us to imagine more particularly the quarter of Saint-Germain-des-Prés.It is also, and mainly, a story about love, the absurdity and the frailty of life.The protagonist couple is Colin and Chloe. Colin is young, rich and carefree. He longs for love. Eventually he finds it next to Chloe. They get married and the world bathes them in honey, up until the day they discover Chloe?s absurd - but strikingly poetic - disease. A water lily grows in the lungs of the young defenseless beauty and pushes out all of her oxygen. They soon find out the only therapeutic process includes inhaling other flowers. And Colin becomes responsible for the ungrateful and expensive task of finding them. That eventually will lead him to poverty. It?s curious to note that Boris Vian had himself suffered in his childhood from a pulmonary disease.The supporting cast includes Chick, Alise e Isis and Nicolas. His great friend Chick is an obsessive collector of noted philosopher Jean-Sol Partre's books (an obvious reference to Jean-Paul Sartre, author of Nausea or The Age of Reason, among many others. This sort of playfulness with words and expressions unique to the French language make it a challenge for the bravest translator, but also a scent of Vian?s devastating irony, and his taste for provocation and parody. This bibliophile obsession will lead him firsthand to meet Alise, another aficionado, and at last extent to drive her insane about it and endlessly kill Partre. But even that is done in such a hilarious and ?Vianesque? way.From all the tragedies among this group of friends, only Nicolas (the chef who invented pianococktails) and Isis escape a tragic destiny and accompany their friends to the end.Boris Vian?s words were often adapted to other mediums, mainly for their humane and plastic qualities. From them theatre plays and even operas (by the Russian Edison Denisov) have been born. Particularly from Foam of the Daze, besides the opera, one can enjoy ?Spray of the Days? (from 1968), a movie by Charles Belmont.Also from Boris Vian other relevant titles are Heart Snatcher (53), Fall in Peking (47), The Ants (49) or Red Grass (50).Not to forget he also published many titles by the name of Vernon Sullivan.One English translation is offered bam Tam Books, with translation by Brian Harper. Other important reference is Stanley Chapman?s Froth on the Daydream, that captured Vian's spirit with his quintessential translation.

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