A nonconformist satire of both bureaucracy and nonconformism from the
French polymath and author of Foam of the Days
Written at the age of 23 for his friends in the winter of 1943-44,
Vercoquin and the Plankton was the first of Vian's novels to be
published under his own name. Published in 1947, the book came out two
months after his succès de scandale I Spit on Your Graves and two
months before the publication of his beloved classic The Foam of the
Days. At once social documentary, scathing satire and jazz manifesto,
Vercoquin and the Plankton describes the collision of two worlds under
the Vichy regime: that of the youthful dandyism of the ever-partying
Zazous and the murderously maniacal bureaucracy of a governmental
office for standardization. In this roman à clef drawn from Vian's own
contradictory lives as a jazz musician on the Left Bank and an engineer
at the French National Organization for Standardization, the reader is
introduced to a handful of characters inhabiting a world lying somewhere
between Occupied Paris and Looney Tunes.
Boris Vian (1920-59) was a French polymath who in his short life
managed to inhabit the roles of writer, poet, playwright, musician,
singer/songwriter, translator, music critic, actor, inventor and
engineer, before dying of a heart attack at the age of 39, after
authoring ten novels, several volumes of short stories, plays, operas,
articles and nearly 500 songs. Vian is remembered as one of the reigning
spirits of the postwar Parisian Latin Quarter, a friend to everyone from
Jean-Paul Sartre to Raymond Queneau and Miles Davis, playing trumpet
with Claude Abadie and Claude Luter, and an influence on such future
kindred spirits as Serge Gainsbourg.
