e-Book Heartsnatcher download

*Heartsnatcher* is an uncategorizable novel--a sort of semi-surrealistic fable ((what fable isn't at least semi-surrealistic?)) written in a playful and poetic style that nonetheless delivers a powerful--if elusive--"moral." It begins when a traveling psychiatrist named Timortis stops at an obscure rural hamlet to lend assistance to a woman very painfully giving birth to triplets. As fate will have it, he'll never leave.

Located far from the city, seemingly existing in a time and world all its own, the town Timortis has stumbled upon in his search for someone to analyze is populated by a community of eccentrics and regulated according to customs that range from the comic to the bizarre to the flat-out grotesque. Timortis, as an outsider, as well as a student of human nature ((he suffers from a dispiriting inner emptiness)), can do little more than observe, adapt, and, eventually, "go native"--that is, if he doesn't do what seems to be the sensible thing: to leave.

Instead Timortis accepts an invitation to stay on at the home of the new parents of little Noel, Joel, and Alfa Romeo. Thus Timortis becomes entangled in a tragic-comic Oedipal drama carried beyond the point of absurdity: Mom, experiencing a profound post-partum disgust with the husband who brought motherhood upon her with his filthy lust, nevertheless broods obsessively over the safety of her little brood; Dad, well-meaning but unwanted, banished from bed and breast, bitterly embraces his lonely fate; and the three little cherubs themselves--by turns mischievous, magical, and innocently cruel--living in the enchanted world of a childhood that must ultimately come to an end...but not if Mom can help it.

*Heartsnatcher*--rather inaptly titled--is a charming, quirky, surprising novel full of life, imagination, and a dreamy wisdom that imparts itself effortlessly to the reader. It's a serious book that never takes itself too seriously--fun, funny, and philosophical all at the same time--a book that strikes me as impossible to dislike and all-too-likely to work its spell on you from page one.

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.

Vian paints a tale of a rural society emblematic of our own. Each character's existence in the story represents a certain trait in ourselves. The plots is fantastical, thoughtful, satirical, and confounding in its poetic beauty.

Another Boris Vian even better than all the rest. Broaden your horizons and read this!

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