The Review of Contemporary Fiction

I Spit on Your Graves, by Boris Vian
reviewed by Monique Dufour

Untitled document

TamTam Books, 1998. 177 pages. $17.00.

With time, most scandalous art mellows into historical curiosity. Lady Chatterley’s Lover’s dirty bits disappoint eight year olds; it endures mainly as a record of pruderies past. But other works survive the vicissitudes of taste and respectability—Ulysses and Lolita “Bitch’s Brew” and “Rite of Spring.” Publishers who specialize in rescuing out-of-print literature settle the difficult but largely abstract questions of literary posterity in very practical ways by deciding which of the thousands of books daily tumbling out of print are worth saving and why. One new press, TamTam Publishers, “is devoted to the purpose of reprinting lost masterpieces” of “20th Century International literature.” It has published three titles so far, among them French writer Boris Vian’s 1946 I Spit on Your Graves, a graphically violent novel about race, sex, lynching, and revenge. Vian, a frequent translator of American pulp novels, claimed that the book was written in English by an African-American writer, Vernon Sullivan. The book became a sensation and a scandal in 1947, when a copy of the novel, with the passage about a strangling underlined, was found in the Paris hotel room in which a man strangled his mistress. Then it was revealed that the book was actually written by Vian and in French. The book is interesting from a historical standpoint because of its publishing history and Vian’s authorship hoax. It’s also a good example of an artful thriller that plays with the pulp conventions and uses the genre to satiric effect—while reading the lurid story, readers are encouraged to conflate social criticism of race relations with sheer titillation, and the reception of the work dramatizes the way people can behave, as though reading a sensational novel about racial violence is the same as doing something about it. Unlike many pulp novels, Vian’s holds up as a strange and shocking read today, no small feat in a gratuitous age.


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The Review of Contemporary Fiction I Spit on Your Graves, by Boris Vian reviewed by Monique Dufour Untitled document TamTam Books, 1998. 177 pages. $17.00. With time, most scandalous art mellows into historical curiosity. Lady Chatterley’s Lover’s dirty bits disappoint eight year olds; it endures mainly as a record of pruderies past. But other works survive the vicissitudes of taste and respectability—Ulysses and Lolita “Bitch’s Brew” and “Rite of Spring.” Publishers who specialize in rescuing out-of-print literature settle the difficult but largely abstract questions of literary posterity in very practical ways by deciding which of the thousands of books daily tumbling out of print are worth saving and why. One new press, TamTam Publishers, “is devoted to the purpose of reprinting lost masterpieces” of “20th Century International literature.” It has published three titles so far, among them French writer Boris Vian’s 1946 I Spit on Your Graves, a graphically violent novel about race, sex, lynching, and revenge. Vian, a frequent translator of American pulp novels, claimed that the book was written in English by an African-American writer, Vernon Sullivan. The book became a sensation and a scandal in 1947, when a copy of the novel, with the passage about a strangling underlined, was found in the Paris hotel room in which a man strangled his mistress. Then it was revealed that the book was actually written by Vian and in French. The book is interesting from a historical standpoint because of its publishing history and Vian’s authorship hoax. It’s also a good example of an artful thriller that plays with the pulp conventions and uses the genre to satiric effect—while reading the lurid story, readers are encouraged to conflate social criticism of race relations with sheer titillation, and the reception of the work dramatizes the way people can behave, as though reading a sensational novel about racial violence is the same as doing something about it. Unlike many pulp novels, Vian’s holds up as a strange and shocking read today, no small feat in a gratuitous age.

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