This is one of those mid-century French novels that keeps escaping its own era because it feels handmade out of style, grief, jazz, absurdity, and class disgust.

Vian’s cult novel is a love story, a satire, and a surreal machine all at once. Colin, wealthy and guileless, falls in love with Chloé; around them the world behaves according to emotional rather than physical law. Rooms shrink, objects develop moods, a piano can generate cocktails, and a water lily begins growing in Chloé’s lung. The book starts in bright, playful invention and gradually curdles into something sadder and more claustrophobic, which is exactly where its force lies. It is whimsical in the old dangerous sense — not cute, but unstable.

It sits somewhere between pataphysics, romance, anti-bourgeois fantasy, and tragic farce. Cult-literary status, translated fiction interest, and a strong object presence in this edition.

TamTam Books paperback, first US edition thus, 2003, translated by Brian Harper.