TamTam Books News

Monday, July 04, 2005:

I just found this review on the Internet - and I have to say it is great to be appreciated by a great writer as well as another fellow Vian lover. This is from James Sallis' column at the Boston Globe:

Address: http://www.boston.com/ae/books/articles/2005/05/22/shivering_typewriters_martian_favorites/

"In Boris Vian's world, I wrote here almost two years ago, mice persuade ambivalent cats to kill them because people they love have died. Stallions are crucified for their sins, and even bathroom fixtures have a life of their own. When one character puts Duke Ellington's ''The Mood to Be Wooed" on the phonograph, the O's on the record label cause the corners of the room to become round: Everything is transitional, becoming. I was reviewing a new translation of Vian's classic ''L'Ecume des jours." Now from the same publisher, Tam Tam Books, we have ''Autumn in Peking" (paperback, $18). The translation, stunning in itself, is by Paul Knobloch.

Ostensibly about the expedition to build a railway in the desert of Exopotamie, populated with engineers, randy priests and hermits, lovelorn couples, and a physician obsessed with model airplanes, as well as by buses that feed on catfish bones, typewriters that shiver when uncovered, and bedclothes that climb affectionately back into place when thrown back, even a chair that falls ill and must be hospitalized, this is the strangest of many strange Vian novels, like the others part science fiction, part love story, part surrealist farce -- and wholly, unforgettably readable."

Tosh // 7:50 AM
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