BLUES FOR A BLACK CAT

Jazz musician, translator of American hard-boiled detective fiction, librettist, pataphysician, Vian (1920-59) was a sort of anti-Camus: an outlaw, a rebel, a dashingly handsome existentialist cafe-figure, yet also a trickster with the lightest of touches, everything about him made of whimsy and enthusiasm, and hardly a dark shading to be found. His prose is a sideshow rather than a main event—and thus Nebraska's French series does well here to give it to us in a small buffet. The form of the detective story is one Vian used often, just so that he could subvert it (``Suddenly, the silhouette of the Major, furious at being left out of the story, rose behind him and seized Andre by the collar. His shoulders hitched up, arms askew, and head forward, Andre gesticulated from a few meters above the railing, crying, `Let me go!' But because the Major was invisible, Andre was the only one who knew the Major had lifted him. As for everyone else, they thought he'd jumped into the river''). Other stories introduce play upon a single name as hip motif enough (``Jacques Teagarden'') or unravel small yarn balls of absurd non sequiturs. As well rendered by Julia Older, this Vian sampler—in its first English translation—is just about a perfect dose for reintroduction of this attractively inconsequential but easy-to- take, classically bohemian figure.