Absurd, as it were. The narrative is absurd from beginning to end. It is amazing how only the author was able to maintain the overall integrity of composition and plot in all this gorgeous tangle of confusing improvisations of meaning and outlines of perception.

The great strangeness and originality of Foam of Days is that it is not a comedy of the absurd, as it seems at first, but a melodrama of the absurd. A complex and unique genre. Much like a clown in a circus arena who, by his actions, brings tears rather than laughter. And it no longer matters that it is a circus, not a theater. People come to the show to have fun, to marvel at the stunts and other wow-effects, but no one even cries anymore, no one asks them to stop. And at the end of the scene, the performer leaves to unstoppable well-deserved applause. An extremely unusual situation for a circus, don’t you think?

In Boris Vian’s “Foam of Days”, as it should be in a truly iconic work, various metaphors and a whole heap of references are widely used (of course, it can’t compete with “Ulysses”, but it gives many a good head start). And what to say about the author’s speech, so precise in finding the right unusual forms to reflect the atypicality of Vian’s thinking and, consequently, inviting the reader to an inner monologue or just rational (or not) thinking. And it’s all short and to the point, as the players say. Here’s a great example from the book:

And indeed… Who would think of stealing flowers? Have you ever thought about that? Why steal flowers? What to do with them then? You can’t eat them, you can’t put them on yourself, you can’t read them on a park bench, you can’t put them in the hallway to hang your hats on. So what to do with flowers? Give a girl stolen ones? But then you lose much of the meaning of the ritual of giving flowers. No, you can sell them as old ladies in the subway. Except that much of the flowers still can not take away, and the shelf life is very limited. That’s how it is!

On the other hand, you can approach this phrase a little differently. If the meaning is not to change. Maybe our society has really entered a phase of “bleaching. Maybe flowers really have ceased to be necessary attributes of social relations and have turned into an impersonal formality, and not always observed? Maybe they didn’t mean theft specifically, but the gratuitousness of such a product? That’s what’s good about Foam of Days: it gives the attentive reader, in mere fragments, more than other works of literature offer in a whole chapter, or even a book.

You know, this novel by Boris Vian is not so much a must-read as a useful one. Even to those who are not connoisseurs of intellectual literature. “Foam of Days” allows you to look at the reality around you from a different perspective of perception. It’s all the same, only very different, very different, not at all the way we’re used to it. Nonfiction fiction in the style of jazz.