I read this many years ago in French, and although I was immediately aware I was reading something special, my French was nowhere near good enough to appreciate all that Vian brought to the novel. Finally got hold of an English translation, and loved it. So beautiful, and yet even now I realize that no translation could possibly wholly capture Vian’s neologisms, his puns, or his weird surrealism. Now going to watch ‘Mood Indigo’, a recent film version of the novel, and, of course, get back to learning French.