Froth on the Daydream

I feel as though this book isn’t widely known. The plot is quite bizarre and surreal–a man falls in love with a woman who is growing a water lily in her lung.

The novel’s theme of grief stood out to me, and I feel it was perfectly illustrated by Collin’s desperate attempts to keep his wife alive. It is evident that Vian used Jean-Paul Sartre’s existentialist philosophy as inspiration for this novel.

In an alternative version of our own society, where jazz music serves all the functions of our present-day internet and cats and mice can talk, there exist two couples who are heading towards disaster because of philosophy and love. In the meantime, they enjoy everything life has to offer, including cocktails made by playing a special type of piano (wrong notes produce alarming flavours) and the fact that inanimate objects can respond to their emotional states. The novel is genuinely poignant as well as incredibly odd, and the evolving story, and the language in which it is told, are always… show more.