"Mr Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls. He liked thick giblet soup, nutty gizzards, a stuffed roast heart, liver slices fried with crust-crumbs, fried hencod's roes. Most of all he liked grilled mutton kidneys which gave to his palate a fine tang of faintly scented urine."
"The coffee-maker was almost ready to bubble. I turned the flame low and watched the water rise. It hung a little at the bottom of the glass tube. I turned the flame up just enough to get it over the hump and then turned it low again quickly. I stirred the coffee and covered it. I set my timer for three minutes.
Very methodical guy, Marlowe. Nothing must interfere with his coffee technique. Not even a gun in the hand of a desperate character."
- The Long Good-Bye, Raymond Chandler
Book by Penguin. Coffee maker by Bialetti. Cup by Marimekko.
"Presently after, he sat on one side of his own hearth, with Mr, Guest, his head clerk, upon the other, and midway between, at a nicely calculated distance from the fire, a bottle of a particular old wine that had long dwelt unsunned in the foundations of his house. The fog still slept on the wing above the drowned city, where the lamps glimmered like carbuncles; and through the muffle and smother of these fallen clouds, the procession of the town's life was still rolling in through the great arteries with a sound as of a mighty wind. But the room was gay with firelight. In the bottle the acids were long ago resolved; the imperial dye had softened with time, as the colour grows richer in stained windows; and the flow of hot autumn afternoons on hillside vineyards was ready to be set free and to disperse the fogs of London."
Earlier this year - after being very highly recommended by a friend who lived in France for several years - I read l'Ecume Des Jours (Foam of the Daze) written by celebrated French author Boris Vian in 1947.
It's a lovely little novel set in a very imaginative, surrealist world where jazz, beautiful women and 'Jean-Sol Partre' reign above all.
The novel is full of great imagery and ideas, including talking mice, a sensitive environment that is reactive to emotions, fatal illnesses caused by flower-inhabited lungs, and a rather revolutionary 'pianocktail' machine which creates cocktails from the music played on a piano. I'm not really sure if the world that Vian creates is ultimately more beautiful than it is scary; I'm inclined to think otherwise, but it certainly is lovely to visit.
Not being French, I can't/won't attempt to comment on a well-loved novel by an author considered to be a national treasure, but I will say that it is a nice and surprising read, and that the upcoming film adaptation by Michel Gondry seems to be very well-suited to the director's oeuvre.
Just look at that imagery! Vian and Gondry were surely made for each other (although throughout his life Boris Vian was always staunchly against film adaptations of his novels - so I do wonder if he were alive if he would still remain adamant).
Being a fan of graphic design I did a search of Foam of the Daze book covers and posters and found that through its many re-prints there have been a number of beautifully designed covers.
Michel Gondry's 2013 adaptation is being released in English as Mood Indigo and stars Romain Duris, Audrey Tautou, Gad Elmaleh and Omar Sy. I look forward to seeing if Gondry envisions the world in the same way that I did when I read the book.
