Heartsnatcher [Paperback]

Boris Vian (Author), Raymond Queneau (Foreword)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 3, 2003

Vian's final and most serious novel begins with an elegant psychiatrist arriving in a remote town, where he helps deliver the triplets of a woman whose husband is locked up in a bedroom because she abhors him for causing the pain and discomfort of her pregnancy. A mix of disturbing incidents and verbal wit, "Heartsnatcher is as funny and strange as the best of Raymond Queneau and Eugene lonesco.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The last novel Vian completed before his death in 1959, this whimsical, absurdist sendup of human foible takes place in a village where old people are auctioned off like slaves, villagers stone the vicar to produce rain and stallions are crucified for "falling into sin." The novel opens with willful Clementine deep in the throes of labor and furious about it. With her husband, Angel, locked in his room (from the outside), Clementine is rescued by Timortis, a traveling psychoanalyst, who helps her deliver triplets. Timortis befriends the browbeaten Angel (Clementine vows never to have sex with him again) and decides to stay on at the house. As a stranger to the country, he provides a window onto its bizarre customs-it is possible to pay someone to take on another person's shame, for example-even as he trolls the village looking for people to psychoanalyze. As the "heartsnatcher" of the title, Timortis has no feelings or desires of his own and embarks on a futile, hysterical quest for patients so he can "steal their feelings." His sole subject is a maid who thinks psychoanalysis is a euphemism for sex; she's happy to take off her clothes, but she refuses to talk about her feelings. The episodic, meandering narrative wanders from incident to incident, until Angel leaves Clementine, and she takes up child-rearing with unbridled abandon. Vian's sharp, playful humor makes for an entertaining read, although there are extended flat stretches. While the allegorical conceits may be something of an acquired taste, Vian's prose is surprisingly accessible, and his fascinating take on the strange logic of human cruelty and inconsistency makes this a worthwhile read.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

This, Vian's last novel before his 1959 death, is a work to be reckoned with. Told from the perspective of an unexamined self-appointed psychiatrist named Timortis, its focus is on Clementine, an increasingly overprotective mother to triplets who come to represent all that is terrifying, delightful, surprising, and confusing about not only children but also humanity. Beginning with her miserable pregnancy and extending through their infancy and toddlerhood, Clementine grows more consumed with her three sons' safety every day. Her need for their world to be completely controlled drives her husband away and eventually drives her to the edge. Timortis, seeking to understand the desires and dreams of all mankind, affably goes along with her schemes, all the while unable to develop his own sense of self. He is subsumed by the backdrop of the novel, a deeply disturbing small town that, among other things, officially heaps all its collective guilt on a designated town scapegoat, auctions its elderly for the amusement of the wealthy, and works its young apprentices literally to death. One would hardly imagine that there is much to laugh at in such a tale, but, strangely, there is. This is a puzzler and a riddle but, every so often, a tickler as well. Debi Lewis
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Paperback: 245 pages
• Publisher: Dalkey Archive; 1 edition (October 3, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1564782999
• ISBN-13: 978-1564782991
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.5 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #851,698 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars "Somebody perfectly free has no urge to do anything at all.", January 7, 2004

By 

Mary Whipple (New England) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Heartsnatcher (Paperback)

In descriptions so richly imagined that he sometimes has to invent new words, Boris Vian brings to life the strange world discovered by a wandering traveler, Timortis, a psychiatrist who has been born an adult and has no memories of his own. An "empty vessel," he believes that if he can learn everything there is to know about someone through psychoanalysis, he can bring about a transferrence of identity and make his own life more complete. When he hears the cries of Clementine, a village woman giving birth to triplets, he stops to give aid and ends up delivering her sons--Noel, Joel, and Alfa Romeo.

Though the birthing scene is humorous, the full satirical flavor and the allegorical construction of this novel do not unfold until Timortis travels into the village. There he discovers that he has arrived just in time for the Old Folks Fair, at which old people are auctioned off like cattle and treated like them. Later Timortis visits a shop where he sees a child being worked to the verge of death, then revived with icewater. Farm animals, however, are given days off when they behave themselves and allowed to hitchhike if they need rides. A scapegoat, named Glory Hallelujah, retrieves putrid, decaying things from a blood-red stream with his teeth, his job being to "swallow the shame of the whole village." The vicar announces that "God is not utilitarian. God is a birthday present...a luxury, a tasseled cushion made of beaten gold." A horse is crucified for his sexual depravity. Additional bizarre episodes abound, leaving the reader to ponder the meaning of the non-stop action, at the same time that s/he is whisked along by the speed of Vian's prose to new and still more surprising events.

Puns, word play, and literary inventions fill the novel, even as Vian's often lyrical sentences and vibrant descriptions set the scenes. Satirizing the existing world for some of its most obvious faults, Vian presents a remarkably open-ended allegory, which makes the reader think at the same time that s/he often laughs at the absurdities and winces at the truths. But this is no full-blown alternative universe created to illustrate a serious and specific political or social agenda. Here Vian symbolically smiles at the reader as he leads Timortis through this strange community from episode to episode, illustrating his own opinions in a more or less random way, having fun all the time, while making some serious points. Not scholarly, though highly literate, this is a book for which one must buckle up, sit back, and just enjoy the ride. Mary Whipple

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Utterly fascinating, July 19, 2005

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CK Dexter Haven (Canada) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Heartsnatcher (Paperback)

Sometimes funny, often disturbing, thoroughly unique, and utterly fascinating. A psychoanalyst goes looking for desires to analyze because he lacks any of his own. He settles in a very bizarre and rather brutal village where shame is forbidden, horses are crucified, old folks auctioned, and a woman makes love at long distance with the blacksmith via a robotic spitting image of herself. Very weird, but not in the usual way. It's all presented so matter of factly, with such a straight face, that the effect is unlike any other literature of its kind.

"He propelled himself towards some particular piece of debris that was floating on the top and picked it up expertly between his teeth. It was a tiny hand. Covered with inkstains. He climbed back on board again. 'Tut, tut,' he said when he looked at it. 'Old Charlie's boy's been refusing to do his homework again."

5.0 out of 5 stars J'adore this book!, November 13, 2009

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L. Czelusniak (Florida, USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Heartsnatcher (Paperback)

I am so glad I discovered this author and this book! I found Vian's flippant and humorous treatment of such serious things in life as a mother's stifling love, shame, depravity and religion all the more effective in showing up mans cruelty. To me, this book was like reading Salvador Dali; teasing symbolism, tantalizing imagery in deep and true colors. Someone wrote here that Vian is a typical French author who doesn't serve up pearls already shucked for you; you have to dive for them yourself. I agree. I also agree that this is more of a literary achievement then an intellectual one but I believe that is only because Vian is having fun with his contemporary writing friends such as Sartre. Anyway, this is one of those books you mustn't work too hard on; just relax and let the story unfold. I think you will find it is a story that continues to reveal itself to you long after you turn that last page.