Book of a Lifetime: Innocence lost in Boris Vian’s Foam of the Daze

From The Independent archive: Xiaolu Guo explores the sadness and joy in the French author’s exploration of youth

French polymath Boris Vian who wrote ‘L’Écume des jours’ (AFP via Getty)

When I was a film-school student in Beijing in the early 1990s, I had randomly picked a French novel in a bookshop – the Chinese translation of L’Écume des jours. I was 20; I had never left China, I had never met any westerner and I had never tasted red wine either.

So I was reading that novel in those barbecue stalls in the streets of Beijing – no cafes around at that time, no Starbucks either – and I got the impression that the book was about melancholy French youth in the 1940s. The translation was not bad.

What I understood was that the author tried to paint a picture of youth. It starts childishly and beautifully but then youth becomes ravaged and swallowed by time and society.