Boris VianLiterary Fiction · Fiction·1920–1959
J'irai cracher sur vos tombes
Synopsis
Published in 1946 under the invented American pseudonym "Vernon Sullivan," and presented as a translation, J'irai cracher sur vos tombes (I Shall Spit on Your Graves) is Boris Vian's scandalous, hard-boiled tale of race and revenge in the American South.
Lee Anderson is a light-skinned Black man able to pass as white. Consumed by rage after his younger brother is lynched for loving a white woman, he arrives in a small Southern town and sets out to take a calculated, seductive, and brutal revenge on the white community that destroyed his family — targeting privileged young white women in particular.
Deliberately styled as lurid American noir, the novel caused an immediate scandal in postwar France and became notorious as much for its pulp violence and eroticism as for the literary hoax behind it. Provocative and disturbing, it remains a razor-edged meditation on racism, hatred, and the corrosive logic of vengeance.
How it reads
- Pas étonnant que ce livre ait été banni en France en 1949. Cependant, deux années auparavant, il était le best-seller de 1947. Étrange... C'est cru, brutal, à la limite du dégoûtant. J'ai hésité à le refermer à plusieurs reprises. Lee Anderson, antihéros, est à la fois répugnant et attachant. Je me suis surprise à vouloir assister à l'exécution de son plan criminel, et en même temps, à sa punition à lui.
- it is a short story yet its impact is very powerful, it is shocking, cruel and bittersweet, a tale of vengence of racism and of human cruelty... Vian uses a very simple style, no linguistic tricks, no stylistic craziness, it is a sober serious writing which gives the story a heavier countenance