Re: RARA-AVIS: Re: I Spit On Your Graves

From: Michael Robison ( zspider@gte.net)
Date: 26 Oct 2002


Al wrote:
> I did indeed recommend this complicated little hardboiled book about
> revenge, written by a white Frenchman pretending to be a black American
> writing a novel about a black man pretending to be white. It was first
> published in 1946 in France, ostensibly as a translation by Boris Vian of
a
> work by an unknown black American author called Vernon Sullivan who had
been
> shunned by American publishers. In fact, Vernon Sullivan was as fictional
> as any of the books' characters. Following a discussion with his wife and
> publisher, Boris Vian wrote I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVES in two weeks with the
> express purpose of creating a bestseller. By 1949, when it was banned in
> France, SPIT had sold over half a million copies.

*********** I stayed up late last night to finish it. It was great. I wonder if he was inspired by Faulkner's LIGHT IN AUGUST, which precedes it by fourteen years with an almost identical confused-race obsession leading to murder.

miker

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