The Red Grass

The Red Grass is a 1950 novel by the French writer Boris Vian, first published that year by Éditions Toutain. Because of its style and themes, it is usually placed within pataphysics, the movement whose best-known exponent is Alfred Jarry, and which is closely linked to the Surrealist current of the mid-twentieth century.

The action unfolds on a plot of land called the Square, a meadow covered in red grass. The engineer Wolf and his assistant, the mechanic Saphir Lazuli, have built a Machine that, by transporting Wolf to different moments of his past, would allow him to erase his memories. This is not a journey through time in the manner of The Time Machine; it is a revisiting of Wolf's own history, which turns the Machine into a kind of psychoanalytic instrument. The story is shaped by the obsessions of the two men: memory and the past in Wolf's case, and a strange alter ego that prevents Lazuli from fully approaching Folavril. These obsessions lead the two men to a tragic ending, while the two women remain relatively unharmed, strengthened by their friendship.

The novel has introspective and, in a metaphorical way, autobiographical features. Vian, like his main character, was an engineer, and at the time of writing he was going through the final stage of a marriage marked by long periods of difficulty and distance, stemming from his wife's relationship with Jean-Paul Sartre.