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Boris Vian belonged to the celebrated "Oulipo" group with Raymond
Queneau who
experimented various writing games in order to compel the French
language, not
always as flexible as one might think (or like), to produce unusual
word
sequences. I love his surrealistic novels, often full of imagination
but also
of tenderness. He was a musician (played the trumpet) and was greatly
admired
by Sartre's coterie. I don't think Nabokov would have particularly
liked his
works if he had happened to read them, but I may be wrong. I am a great
admirer
of Boris Vian; I wrote my first novel, "La polka piquée" (L'âge
d'homme, 1982),
a campus novel around the first conference on American Literature
behind the
Iron Curtain (Poland) (a surrealistic event which I attended with my
good
friend Malcolm Bradbury), under his influence.
Maurice Couturier