The idea is that whoever shakes the coconut-tree secretly hopes that a few coconuts will fall on some heads, not quite accidentally, but in a somewhat random fashion. It may be that Boris Vian was in such a frame of mind when he wrote J'irai cracker sur vos tombes in the summer 1946—to shake things up a bit, to get ahead in his life, i.e. to be published. But then little did he know that this B-class thriller would blow up, like a bomb flung into the French literary circus, in the years to come. How could he foresee that his novel would sell more than half a million copies by 1950, and become the best-seller of 1947, topping all other sales, including those of Sartre, Beauvoir, Camus, and Malraux, the intellectual avant-garde elite of the time. I Spit On Your Graves was published as if it were the original version of a thriller, written by an African-American writer named Vernon Sullivan. Boris Vian claimed to have translated the novel into French so that it could be published in France.
What do You think about I Spit On Your Graves (1999)?
