On your graves

To cross the line is to be a white-skinned man but with black genes and blood, in a society that does not like to see the blacks outside the cage. That is the issue raised by the novel "On Your Graves" by Boris Vian, a novel that formed a moment of shock in 1964 within conservative French literature and its comfortable representations of the world. Boris Vian, with his frank language, reached the point of impudence, and with his strange poeticism, a new type of writing emerged, described as coming from another planet. And perhaps what is surprising about this novel is that it was credited with its great success to a French officer who committed murder, leaving near the body a book by Vian on a specific page where the hero kills his lover in the same way. Boris Vian knew how to blend in his masterpiece "On Your Graves" violence, sex, and confronting racism in one melting pot, thus revealing an early condemnation of a world where black and white lines intertwine and clash until the explicit word becomes the only bullet capable of creating a gap in it.