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maev's review against another edition
4.0
Les bons romans n'ont rien de moral. Ils ont du vrai. Les réactions sucitées par ce livre montrent selon moi à quel point il fait partie de ces bons romans. En lisant, on fait face à sa propre agressivité, sa propre haine, on rencontre un personnage qui viole, qui tue. Mais l'on continue à lire. Et quand on a fini, on peut ou se dire que c'était dégoûtant, que ce livre n'a d'autre but que de choquer en allant dans les extrêmes, ou bien on peut prendre conscience de nos propres résistances face à ce que l'on a ressenti pendant notre lecture.
Que vous soyez le lecteur révolté ou le lecteur averti, là n'est pas la question : J'irai cracher est un livre qui ne s'oublie pas car il révèle quelque chose de profondément humain, de profondément terrible, en impliquant le lecteur d'une manière unique.
Que vous soyez le lecteur révolté ou le lecteur averti, là n'est pas la question : J'irai cracher est un livre qui ne s'oublie pas car il révèle quelque chose de profondément humain, de profondément terrible, en impliquant le lecteur d'une manière unique.
jbermellon's review against another edition
5.0
Este libro, sin duda, merece una reseña. Pronto, pronto...
malex's review against another edition
4.0
I cannot process how I feel about this book. I was disgusted nearly all the way through but once I started I just could.not.stop. So I guess I liked it, right? I think I did but ugh that character is despicable.
stewarthome's review against another edition
5.0
I Spit On Your Graves was a literary hoax which was first published as if it had been written in English by an Afro-American author called Vernon Sullivan and Vian was merely its translator. In fact there was no Vernon Sullivan, the ostensible author of this work was a figment of Vian’s imagination and the book was written in French and only translated into English by the author and Milton Rosenthal after it became a bestselling sensation. The plot of I Spit On Your Graves echoes Richard Wright’s novel Native Son, although Vian’s book is both more sadistic and self-consciously misanthropic. In Wright’s book the death of a white girl at the hands of an Afro-American is almost accidental, but nonetheless as a direct consequence this victim of racial oppression feels ‘free for the first time in his life’. Vian’s first person narrator Lee Anderson adopts a prose style and worldview heavily influenced by Henry Miller and James M. Cain, thus the book is self-consciously generic not just in its borrowed plot but also in its style. Although Anderson identifies himself as an Afro-American male, he is able to pass as white and revels in seducing privileged southern girls who have no idea that he is black. These sexual conquests are presented as a form of revenge against the white racists who Anderson tells us murdered his darker skinned brother. However, Anderson’s sexual shenanigans are a mere prelude to him slaughtering two white sisters, Lou and Jean Asquith. The twin homicides are coldly planned and self-consciously carried out as an act of revenge against the racist society that has oppressed Anderson and murdered his brother. Given this it seems reasonable to conclude that like the noir novels and films by which it was inspired, Vian’s book is an essentially conservative response to the overdeveloped world’s mid-twentieth century crisis of masculinity. However, while gender theory provides useful tools with which to examine Vian’s book, there are other factors that need to be taken into account. Immediately prior to the narrator Lee Anderson strangling and then shooting Jean Asquith who is pregnant with his baby, the novel is given a particularly nihilistic twist when he asks her: ‘Do you always like it so much when you get laid by a colored man?’ (Page 166).
Read this review in full here: http://www.stewarthomesociety.org/sex/tam.htm
Read this review in full here: http://www.stewarthomesociety.org/sex/tam.htm
miguel's review against another edition
1.0
Boris Vian's I Spit on Your Graves is a text I can confidently say no one will enjoy reading. When considered less as a novel and more as a curio, it is remarkable. Vian wrote the novel pseudonymously, as Vernon Sullivan. Sullivan was supposedly a Black man living in the United States. Vian, a white Frenchman, "discovered" Sullivan's text and "translated" it into French. Of course, the French version is the original and it is only figuratively a translation, quite a poor one at that, of Black American subjectivity.
The text is violent and vile and for almost no payoff at all. Native Son this is not. It offers little insight into the genres it is aligned with: avant-garde French writing, U.S. Black literature, and U.S. hardboiled fiction. The novel is also mentioned in studies of film noir. However, this novel has less in common with any of those than it does bourgeois U.S. postmodernism, with all its masculinism and lack of self-awareness. Vian anticipates Brett Easton Ellis more than he's influenced by Raymond Chandler or Chester Himes.
Still, even from an academic perspective, I can find little here in the text itself that isn't better captured in more aesthetically competent texts. Many critics have noted Vian's supposed anti-racist position serves as little more as an alibi for gross misogyny. I am inclined to agree. The material conditions of the text's production, transmission, reception, and legacy are worth studying. However, if one can do that while avoiding subjecting themselves to the text itself, all the better.
The text is violent and vile and for almost no payoff at all. Native Son this is not. It offers little insight into the genres it is aligned with: avant-garde French writing, U.S. Black literature, and U.S. hardboiled fiction. The novel is also mentioned in studies of film noir. However, this novel has less in common with any of those than it does bourgeois U.S. postmodernism, with all its masculinism and lack of self-awareness. Vian anticipates Brett Easton Ellis more than he's influenced by Raymond Chandler or Chester Himes.
Still, even from an academic perspective, I can find little here in the text itself that isn't better captured in more aesthetically competent texts. Many critics have noted Vian's supposed anti-racist position serves as little more as an alibi for gross misogyny. I am inclined to agree. The material conditions of the text's production, transmission, reception, and legacy are worth studying. However, if one can do that while avoiding subjecting themselves to the text itself, all the better.
egarements's review against another edition
3.0
I have mixed feelings and I feel nauseated but I guess it was the point so good job but also wtf.
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