Boris Vian - Vercoquin e o Plâncton

Boris Vian's hilarious classic about another kind of liberation.
Published in 1947, Vercoquin and Plankton is Boris Vian's first novel. An euphoric work that revives the surprise parties that had become popular in Paris in the mid-1940s, when the population finally found itself free from Nazi occupation and the months of tension at the end of the war. The surprise parties consisted of a kind of carnival raid in which a group of people, more or less known to each other, met in the streets or cafes and decided to organize a party at the house of someone more or less known in the community (without that person knowing). They brought jazz records, danced, and partied. It is in this environment that we meet the Major, a recurring character in Boris Vian's works, and also Vercoquin, who gives the book its title.

At the first party, the Major meets the young and beautiful Zizanie; at the second, they become engaged. Between the two parties, the Major develops a complicated and amusing strategy to obtain permission from Zizanie's uncle, his guardian, to accept the relationship. A unique work from one of the most original voices in 20th-century French literature. It maps social relations in an atmosphere of euphoria, where the rigors and hierarchical filters of a "respectable" society approach a constant social vaudeville, in which the expression of joy and freedom is the ultimate goal.The regular reader of Boris Vian will find fabulous dialogues, a striking social critique, the explosive surrealism of social confrontation in a remarkable literary fireworks display full of good humor (sometimes quite dark) and lots and lots of jazz...

"Vian wrote with the voice of the 20th century, Vian brought novelty and modernity to French literature, its music, its theater, and had no equal." - Serge Gainsbourg