Boris Vian, born near Paris in 1920, was most well known as a novelist and playwright. He wrote over 400 songs and was one of the first to protest against the Algerian war with his song Le Deserteur, which was banned by the government. Suffering from a heart condition, Vian tried to sleep as little as possible to benefit from life to the utmost. He calculated that at the age of 40, he would have lived as long as someone 102 years old who had slept normally. He married twice and had two children. Although Vian was not taken seriously as a writer during his life time, he was a famous personality among the existentialist and post-surrealistic circles of Paris. In 1952 he cofounded the Transcendent Satrap of the Collège de Pataphysique, an unconventional literary association founded to perpetuate the memory of Alfred Jarry. Vian died suddenly of a heart attack in 1959 at the age of 39 while watching a preview of the screen version of J'irai cracher sur vos tombes - of which he didn't approve.

Vian creates a whole new world, satirizing the existing world for some of its most obvious faults, and presenting 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 Wihpple)

Even when everything happens as a rupture between language and rationality, Boris Vian manages a distortion of the framework and its elements, almost normal, improper for the purposes for which it was originally intended. It's like the gushing-strange identity of the author would be molded on each character in the Heartsnatcher novel, on the back of a rocking chair where only the weight and force of the acts create movement. The fact is that the perspective from which Boris Vian arranges things in acts and acts in things may be his opera's defining features.
Beyond the socio-religious satire and all the failures of any kind who are denounced, the Heartsnatcher is a testimony, an irrefutable proof of the great genius behind - Boris Vian. The book overflows with neologisms and an admirable clear language, including his famous delirium.

Vian tells the story of a psychiatrist in search of - not of patients in the conventional sense - but of a solution before any selfish to its problems, wanting to test at the same time a new form of consultation - he has been born an adult and has no memories of his own. Starting from this confusing premise - the hero - Timortis is tumbling in a strange village and then, he stays in the house of a couple whose wife is giving birth. Timortis believes that if he can learn everything there is to know about someone through psychoanalysis, he can bring about a transference of identity and make his own life more complete. For example, when he hears the cries of Clementine(the village woman) giving birth to triplets, he stops to give aid and ends up delivering her sons: Noel, Joel, and Alfa Romeo. Furthermore, Timortis begins to believe that psychoanalysis can function on any human being alive, including animals.
The book also traces the descent into the hell of a neurotic young mother who slowly removes her offsprings from the living world. He spoke about the fate of pensioners, the interests of psychoanalysis and popular beliefs and offers - at any point - visions about childhood, estimated by the author as well as a nearly lost paradise.
The Heartsnatcher made totally hilarious adventures of several stunned lost in the meanders of a poetic universe at any point of surrealism. Adults are creatures capable of vicious acts, of all possible and imaginable pranks. They organized, for example, the famous old fair, during which the elderly was kindly up for auction. A few miles away, the children explore their extraordinary magical universe at their disposal, without having to worry about the limits imposed on them, in normal conditions. The travelling result is the effect of static anger, a frozen way of passing from one cadre to another: Sharp narrow insects had burrowed thousands of minute holes into the earth; it was like walking on frostbitten sponge. Timortis sauntered along, looking at the deep centres of the calamines throbbing in the flat sunshine

The life of the village with its old disgusting fair, its bloody river in which the selfish is responsible for collecting all the shame of the villagers, employers who are dying at work and on the other hand, the life of Clementine - the mother of the triplets - who locks up in a cage her children to protect them from unforeseeable risks. Those literary inventions fill the novel, even as Vian's often lyrical sentences and vibrant descriptions set the scenes.
Personally, I didn't feel the link between the life of the villagers and the inhabitants of the house at the edge of the cliff - except the both sides are in a world where no place is left to humanity.
Fortunately, the children have many resources that adults have no idea about: after being able to fly by eating slugs, they escaped from their maternal cage.

Never vulgar, always full of a spirit - strikingly and devilishly refreshing - Boris Vian had the certain gift mixing humor and tragedy, complexity and weight. This language had sought the simple beauty - here's the impression that a perpetual string stretches more and more until an explosion, which bathes the hero in a strange atmosphere.