Les Enfants Terribles

Feb 25, 2012 Mariel rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: it was really the silver age

Recommended to Mariel by: pretty little

I can see myself becoming part of the room. The two sets of grandparents in their big bed they never leave from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory appealed to me. I would have sat by their one-bed-fits-all and listened to them bicker. Words of wisdom, or in another conversation entirely, as was the case with one of the grandmothers. I don't need the chocolate (I didn't say I didn't want it!) but I need those grandparents and their world within a world (the poorest shack in the coldest town where...more I can see myself becoming part of the room. The two sets of grandparents in their big bed they never leave from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory appealed to me. I would have sat by their one-bed-fits-all and listened to them bicker. Words of wisdom, or in another conversation entirely, as was the case with one of the grandmothers. I don't need the chocolate (I didn't say I didn't want it!) but I need those grandparents and their world within a world (the poorest shack in the coldest town where the one bright spot is a factory. You bet I'd stay in bed all day!). I can see myself taking over the room. Move aside, Paul and Elisabeth, those grim children with untrue smiles. They had photographs of romantic profiles that suggest to them the hazy outer edges of dreams they are too afraid to allow a full shape. The room is a suggestion. If the real world knocked on its door it would not be allowed to enter. I guess they are like religious people who wait for the return of Christ, or millennium party goers, or Elijah the Prophet's hosts or women who sit on the uncomfortable sofa when they've been obviously stood up. Justin Bieber's whole fan base. I have more dreams than the four young people put together. Is that something to brag about? Frail bodied, mortally wounded soul (it's just a scratch), and feeling all of the time how I feel when I'm flu dreamy Paul. Elisabeth who would take too heart way too much that George Michael song about the sister preacher teacher put your tiny hand in mind. It's just a song! Faith, too. Butt in tight jeans and all. Agatha the professional mannequin. Agatha the.... yeah, mannequin. She'd be in the window of the room, if they had one to the world. Facing the street and brother and sister take turns dressing it up with how they want the room to look that dad. Gerard... The eyes in the audience. Was it a good show that night? Did shoulders rub together (did anyone grab your butt? No? Poor thing)? I would have put things in the treasure drawer. I would have taken over and put them all into position to take part in my own plays of distraction. I hope I'd find the muster to leave. Teen girls lose interest in the cute one, the sweet one, the dark one, the... I forget. There should be more than once face. No more toys in the toy box. There weren't more ways to skin a cat (someone said this to me a couple of days ago. I backed away slowly). They didn't find new images to stretch out like water filling other shapes. The vampire teeth hooked in more, more, more to get through blended days didn't suck something else. I would have been in the room (I am a vampire) and they didn't take me down with them. I wish (not really. Then The Holy Terrors would have disturbed me instead of just fascinated me) I had been taken down too. Why didn't I need it? I recognize the fairy tale desire without it being my own.

Rosamond Lehmann translated! I somehow didn't realize this until I actually picked up the book to read (it had been sitting on my bookshelves for some time). Lehmann wrote Invitation to the Waltz and The Weather in the Streets (she wrote a lot more but these are the two that I've read). She's great. It's interesting to me how not like her own books her translation is (this means she's really good, right?). I am also thinking a lot about those books and how much "I wish that she had read more books so she could live in those instead of with lifeless real people" I felt about Olivia from those books. Maybe Lehmann started to wish that too, if this is how she read this story. The room and the fire need more, more, more to burn. The more isn't the outsiders of Agatha and Gerard. It's not the two sided face on brother and sister. Agatha with the same face as Paul's only recurring dream of the boy who happened to throw the snowball to invalidate him. It would have happened anyway, like an avalanche. If you're going to live in a room you need to find some way to leave it if it's going to keep you alive. I abandoned the sinking ship. Anyway, Lehmann is great and so is Cocteau. And I still need more. And I have a lot.

There's a chance I'm just messed up and the room wasn't supposed to be attractive. Don't tell me if that's the case.(less)

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Dec 19, 2011 Shan Jago rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

As a teenager I became obsessed with French Literature (the poets, mostly – Apollinaire, Baudelaire, Verlaine, Valéry) via the gritty, yet transcendent, boho magic of Rimbaud’s Illuminations. I started writing my own poetry, let my clothes go to rags, used a little wooden pipe, and tacked a photo of Rimbaud (you know the one) next to a poster of the Stones in ’69. There was something so darkly sensual, earthy, yet romantic, in French writing that I rarely found anywhere else. Hot blood flooding...more

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Mar 16, 2009 Lavinia rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: 2009, fiction

A sort of surrealist reading. A love and hate experience of two orphan siblings (Paul, Elisabeth) which includes games (The Game, actually - their game) and plays that replace the real life. These games and especially the plays require partners and, mostly, an audience (Gerard, Agathe). And when the audience becomes too involved and the risk of intrusion in their inner word is too obvious, they are masterfully (and mischievously) removed.

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May 17, 2010 Paquita Maria Sanchez rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: literature, favorites

Reading this is sort of like floating up, up, up into the clouds of a beautiful, serene blue summer sky, then suddenly dropping dozens of stories and getting bashed into billions of bloody, mushy bits.

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Dec 31, 2007 Andrey rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

The book starts out as an innocent coming-of-age story but transforms itself into a macabre phantasmagoric thriller towards the end.

Breathtakingly beautiful Cocteau's style illuminates the themes of teenage friendship and love, jealousy and cruelty, his imagination creating grotesque and twisted but eminently fascinating and haunting images.

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Aug 28, 2011 Dolly Delightly rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Jean Cocteau’s Les Enfants Terribles is a book about “the mysteries of childhood” and one which could not have been written by a more appropriate contender as the phrase, in the singular, has frequently been used to describe Cocteau himself. Born on 5th July 1889 in Maisons-Laffitte, Yvelines, a small village a few miles outside Paris, into a wealthy and politically influential family, Cocteau left home at the age of 15. His father, a lawyer and an amateur painter, shot himself in his bed when C...more Jean Cocteau’s Les Enfants Terribles is a book about “the mysteries of childhood” and one which could not have been written by a more appropriate contender as the phrase, in the singular, has frequently been used to describe Cocteau himself. Born on 5th July 1889 in Maisons-Laffitte, Yvelines, a small village a few miles outside Paris, into a wealthy and politically influential family, Cocteau left home at the age of 15. His father, a lawyer and an amateur painter, shot himself in his bed when Cocteau was nine – a tragedy which is thought to have kindled Cocteau’s perfervid fascination with death. Speaking about it at the end of his own life, Cocteau said that his father had killed himself “for reasons that are no longer relevant” even though they continued to plague him. At the age of 19, Cocteau published his first collection of poems, Aladdin’s Lamp. Three years later, another anthology, The Frivolous Prince, followed. Cocteau quickly became a mastodon of the corpuscular literary scene of 1920s Paris, mingling with the likes of Marcel Proust, Andre Gide, Maurice Barrès and Jean Hugo. He wrote more than 50 books in his lifetime, but Les Enfants Terribles remains at the pinnacle of his oeuvre. Penned in just 17 days, the book captures the “legend of eternal youth” and its inevitable tragedies which, as Cocteau says, “bare no relation to one’s preconceived ideas,” because “one is always bewildered by their simplicity”.

The story of Les Enfants Terribles – inspired by a real life tale of a “family closed from societal life” – revolves around a brother and sister who inhabit a world of their own, a fantasy world with its own rules, created to alleviate the monotonous languor of everyday realities. Elisabeth and Paul’s psychological pulsations, partly responsible, for their alienation from the world at large are established early. A mother crippled by some paralytic illness, a woman who “only four months ago had been young and vigorous” but now at the mere age of 35 “longed for death,” a woman who “had been bewitched, spoiled and finally deserted by her husband.” Cocteau illustrates the situation further: “For three years he [the father] had gone on treating his family to occasional brief visits, during the course of which – having meanwhile developed cirrhosis of the liver – he would brandish revolvers, threaten suicide, and order them to nurse the master of the house; for the mistress with whom he lived refused this office and kicked him out whenever his attacks occurred. His custom was to go back to her as soon as he felt better. He turned up one day at home, raged, stamped, took to his bed, found himself unable to get up again, and died; thereby bestowing his end upon the wife he had repudiated. An impulse of rebellion now turned this woman into a mother who neglected her children, took to night clubs, got herself up like a tart, sacked her maid once a week, begged, borrowed indiscriminately,” and finally died.

Right from the outset Les Enfants Terribles emanates an “atmosphere of perpetually impending storm” when Paul gets struck by a “marble-fisted blow” of a snowball, hurled in play by Dargelos, the subject of Paul’s infatuation, which leaves him incapacitated and revelling in the “sweet delights of sickness and perpetual holiday” under his sister’s care. Elisabeth, the “ministering angel” hastily reveals herself to be an enclave of jealousy, malevolence and lust looming over the household like a “Byzantine Empress”. One very quickly realises that the relationship between the siblings is not as straightforward or orthodox as social mores prescribe, and tentatively reels on the verge of incest, their incongruous love never consummated but paramount. Elisabeth is a domineering soubrette, a hurricane to Paul’s harmony, manipulating and conniving in her efforts to keep him all to herself and to comminute anyone who gets in her way. Paul’s quixotic nature paints him as a biddable naïf determinedly under his sister’s spell. The two together, live in “The Room” perpetually playing “The Game” according to unwritten, recherché rules known only to them. The siblings, the “twin seraphs”, curiously united by a familial intimacy verging on romantic love, do not know the meaning of “embarrassment in the presence of each other” and their shared space is “a masterpiece of their own being” in which they live, dress, wash together as if “twin halves of a single body.” Left largely to their own devices, after the death of their mother whom they had treated “with scant consideration, but nevertheless they loved” Elisabeth and Paul entice outside spectators into “The Game”. Gerard and Agathe get whirl-winded into the snare and the love-hate sibling relationship kept under a strict “seal of secrecy”. “The Room”, their room, becomes like a “gypsy camp” and the brother and sister who once “adored” and “devoured each other” begin to drift apart, except Elisabeth refuses to let go until the two of them can meet elsewhere “where flesh dissolves, where soul dissolves, where incest lurks no more.”

Cocteau’s ability to capture the reader’s attention and direct it to the idiosyncrasies and psychological antecedents behind the events in Les Enfants Terribles underlines the book’s intrigue and the writer’s brilliance. But, in his early years, as the epitome of moderne amid 1920s bohemian circles, Cocteau experienced an unexpected but rapid fall from grace and was dismissed as a social chameleon, a crude dilettante and an uncommitted aesthete. He was deemed frivolous for diversifying into poesy, painting and cinema . Andre Breton regarded him with particular animosity and along with his Surrealist companions attempted to sabotage Cocteau’s artistic endeavours. Cocteau himself did some collateral damage too by spreading himself too thinly. It wasn’t merely his poor health, aggravated by decades of opium abuse and subsequent detoxification, it was also the fact that he continuously put himself on the line, at once consumed by the world and consuming others to gain greater acclaim and clout as an artist. Thus, he lived in an eternal state of identity crisis and by his own admission continued to experience anguish and turmoil, from as early as his father’s suicide up to the tragic and premature deaths of his closest male paramours.

Cocteau’s literary undertakings were inexorably influence by his mercurial disposition and unremitting fatalism. They also exhibited his profound leanings toward death, morbidity and violence, engendering many paternal phantoms and references to suicide. This is particularly true of Les Enfants Terribles which also reflects his idealism and captivation with the cult of youth, his need of fantasy at once unnerving and enthralling like the escapist machinations of Paul and Elisabeth. The element of melodrama in Les Enfants Terribles is handled with considerable acuity, and the alluring horror which pervades the ingenuous self-destruction of the siblings is led gloriously to a ripe climax. The book entails copious cross references form William Shakespeare to Lord Byron to Sigmund Freud, all of which coalesce masterfully to make a very poignant point, namely that love is wayward, cruel, uncompromising and in the extreme: fatal.(less)

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Jun 20, 2008 Lisa (OhThatLisa) rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: Mimes

Shelves: 1001-books

If this book took place in a mental institution it would make much more sense. As it is though, two orphaned teenage siblings retreat from life and immerse themselves in an ever-narrowing fantasy world, until reality looms and threatens to destroy "the game". Tragedy ensues, naturally.

Les Enfants Terribles is so French that it should be wearing a beret and a stripey shirt. It's got that faux-lofty, surrealist, mime-stuck-in-a-box feel to it. Annoying, basically, not to mention claustrophobic, g...more

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Sep 19, 2012 Juushika rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: status-borrowed, trope-desert-island-paradise

The unusual, violent intimacy of adolescent siblings Paul and Elizabeth only grows when they're orphaned; between them they build a strange and private Room--but it is too fragile to be maintained forever. The Holy Terrors (Les Enfants Terribles) is a book equally strange and fragile, holding its subject in a dreamlike haze: time skips forward and then lingers; the voice (distinctly in translation, but strong) embraces nuance, finding it even when the siblings are at their most absurd, but maint...more

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Apr 27, 2012 knig rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: 2012, dream-like, quirky

Bizarre Westermarck –defiant melodrama tuned in to the obsessive convolvulations ™ of a brother and sister who transverse a wide gamut of other relationships but ultimately end up each others best playdate.

Orphaned through a stroke of magical surrealism, Elisabeth and Paul end up keeping house together as teens in 1920s Paris. Much like Pippi Longstocking lording it in Villa Vellikulla, Elisabeth and Paul, unencumbered by crass considerations such as money, schooling, or other boring quotidian w...more Bizarre Westermarck –defiant melodrama tuned in to the obsessive convolvulations ™ of a brother and sister who transverse a wide gamut of other relationships but ultimately end up each others best playdate.

Orphaned through a stroke of magical surrealism, Elisabeth and Paul end up keeping house together as teens in 1920s Paris. Much like Pippi Longstocking lording it in Villa Vellikulla, Elisabeth and Paul, unencumbered by crass considerations such as money, schooling, or other boring quotidian worries, abandon themselves to an imaginary world of mind games, which, although never explicitly elucidated, seem to carry an overtone of a build up to a grande incestuous denouement. You know, first you start pressing a cold bowl of crayfish over your naked brother’s prone form, and take it from there.

Of course, such games are even more delicious with an audience, and so two outsiders: Gerrard and Agatha are roped in to succor the Thespians with admiration and gratitude. A few soubriquets on the fringe of this quartet round out this Freudian entanglement: Paul, apart from coveting his sister, also happens to be bisexual, or perhaps completely homosexual: his fascination with a childhood bully, Dargelos, informs his qualia: and when Agatha appears, bearing an androgynous resemblance to Dargelos, Paul pretty much loses it. He wanders about, forlorn in love: but with whom? Elisabeth? Dargelos? Agatha?Love itself, as framed by the quartet, a love that may not possibly exist outside it?

Elisabeth herself is needy: she needs all players focused on her, irrespective of gender. The thought of Paul ceding the pact with Agatha puts her in a frenzy Freud would have been proud of. Here, a rush of melodrama catapults this tragedy towards a predictable, yet no less satisfying end, as Shakesperean ploys of crossing and double crossing see the quartet mutate and take on a number of interrelationship combinations before the big bang finale.

Necromania, incest, surrealism and sexual exploration: just what the French are best at, served with a cherry on top.
(less)

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Feb 17, 2012 James rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: fiction, gay

This is a fantastic, surreal and artistic book, incredibly erotically charged, which explores the other, darker side of love. It is a story about a brother and sister, Paul and Elisabeth – without a father and with an invalid mother – and the different romantic obsessions that they have. At first Paul is obsessed with another boy, Dargelos, who looks very feminine. Paul becomes very ill when Dargelos throws a snowball at him that has a rock inside it, and Elisabeth looks after him. She is fairly...more

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Aug 14, 2011 Dolly Delightly rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Jean Cocteau’s Les Enfants Terribles is a book about “the mysteries of childhood” and one which could not have been written by a more appropriate contender as the phrase, in the singular, has frequently been used to describe Cocteau himself. Born on 5th July 1889 in Maisons-Laffitte, Yvelines, a small village a few miles outside Paris, into a wealthy and politically influential family, Cocteau left home at the age of 15. His father, a lawyer and an amateur painter, shot himself in his bed when C...more Jean Cocteau’s Les Enfants Terribles is a book about “the mysteries of childhood” and one which could not have been written by a more appropriate contender as the phrase, in the singular, has frequently been used to describe Cocteau himself. Born on 5th July 1889 in Maisons-Laffitte, Yvelines, a small village a few miles outside Paris, into a wealthy and politically influential family, Cocteau left home at the age of 15. His father, a lawyer and an amateur painter, shot himself in his bed when Cocteau was nine – a tragedy which is thought to have kindled Cocteau’s perfervid fascination with death. Speaking about it at the end of his own life, Cocteau said that his father had killed himself “for reasons that are no longer relevant” even though they continued to plague him. At the age of 19, Cocteau published his first collection of poems, Aladdin’s Lamp. Three years later, another anthology, The Frivolous Prince, followed. Cocteau quickly became a mastodon of the corpuscular literary scene of 1920s Paris, mingling with the likes of Marcel Proust, Andre Gide, Maurice Barrès and Jean Hugo. He wrote more than 50 books in his lifetime, but Les Enfants Terribles remains at the pinnacle of his oeuvre. Penned in just 17 days, the book captures the “legend of eternal youth” and its inevitable tragedies which, as Cocteau says, “bare no relation to one’s preconceived ideas,” because “one is always bewildered by their simplicity”.

The story of Les Enfants Terribles – inspired by a real life tale of a “family closed from societal life” – revolves around a brother and sister who inhabit a world of their own, a fantasy world with its own rules, created to alleviate the monotonous languor of everyday realities. Elisabeth and Paul’s psychological pulsations, partly responsible, for their alienation from the world at large are established early. A mother crippled by some paralytic illness, a woman who “only four months ago had been young and vigorous” but now at the mere age of 35 “longed for death,” a woman who “had been bewitched, spoiled and finally deserted by her husband.” Cocteau illustrates the situation further: “For three years he [the father] had gone on treating his family to occasional brief visits, during the course of which – having meanwhile developed cirrhosis of the liver – he would brandish revolvers, threaten suicide, and order them to nurse the master of the house; for the mistress with whom he lived refused this office and kicked him out whenever his attacks occurred. His custom was to go back to her as soon as he felt better. He turned up one day at home, raged, stamped, took to his bed, found himself unable to get up again, and died; thereby bestowing his end upon the wife he had repudiated. An impulse of rebellion now turned this woman into a mother who neglected her children, took to night clubs, got herself up like a tart, sacked her maid once a week, begged, borrowed indiscriminately,” and finally died.

Right from the outset Les Enfants Terribles emanates an “atmosphere of perpetually impending storm” when Paul gets struck by a “marble-fisted blow” of a snowball, hurled in play by Dargelos, the subject of Paul’s infatuation, which leaves him incapacitated and revelling in the “sweet delights of sickness and perpetual holiday” under his sister’s care. Elisabeth, the “ministering angel” hastily reveals herself to be an enclave of jealousy, malevolence and lust looming over the household like a “Byzantine Empress”. One very quickly realises that the relationship between the siblings is not as straightforward or orthodox as social mores prescribe, and tentatively reels on the verge of incest, their incongruous love never consummated but paramount. Elisabeth is a domineering soubrette, a hurricane to Paul’s harmony, manipulating and conniving in her efforts to keep him all to herself and to comminute anyone who gets in her way. Paul’s quixotic nature paints him as a biddable naïf determinedly under his sister’s spell. The two together, live in “The Room” perpetually playing “The Game” according to unwritten, recherché rules known only to them. The siblings, the “twin seraphs”, curiously united by a familial intimacy verging on romantic love, do not know the meaning of “embarrassment in the presence of each other” and their shared space is “a masterpiece of their own being” in which they live, dress, wash together as if “twin halves of a single body.” Left largely to their own devices, after the death of their mother whom they had treated “with scant consideration, but nevertheless they loved” Elisabeth and Paul entice outside spectators into “The Game”. Gerard and Agathe get whirl-winded into the snare and the love-hate sibling relationship kept under a strict “seal of secrecy”. “The Room”, their room, becomes like a “gypsy camp” and the brother and sister who once “adored” and “devoured each other” begin to drift apart, except Elisabeth refuses to let go until the two of them can meet elsewhere “where flesh dissolves, where soul dissolves, where incest lurks no more.”

Cocteau’s ability to capture the reader’s attention and direct it to the idiosyncrasies and psychological antecedents behind the events in Les Enfants Terribles underlines the book’s intrigue and the writer’s brilliance. But, in his early years, as the epitome of moderne amid 1920s bohemian circles, Cocteau experienced an unexpected but rapid fall from grace and was dismissed as a social chameleon, a crude dilettante and an uncommitted aesthete. He was deemed frivolous for diversifying into poesy, painting and cinema . Andre Breton regarded him with particular animosity and along with his Surrealist companions attempted to sabotage Cocteau’s artistic endeavours. Cocteau himself did some collateral damage too by spreading himself too thinly. It wasn’t merely his poor health, aggravated by decades of opium abuse and subsequent detoxification, it was also the fact that he continuously put himself on the line, at once consumed by the world and consuming others to gain greater acclaim and clout as an artist. Thus, he lived in an eternal state of identity crisis and by his own admission continued to experience anguish and turmoil, from as early as his father’s suicide up to the tragic and premature deaths of his closest male paramours.

Cocteau’s literary undertakings were inexorably influence by his mercurial disposition and unremitting fatalism. They also exhibited his profound leanings toward death, morbidity and violence, engendering many paternal phantoms and references to suicide. This is particularly true of Les Enfants Terribles which also reflects his idealism and captivation with the cult of youth, his need of fantasy at once unnerving and enthralling like the escapist machinations of Paul and Elisabeth. The element of melodrama in Les Enfants Terribles is handled with considerable acuity, and the alluring horror which pervades the ingenuous self-destruction of the siblings is led gloriously to a ripe climax. The book entails copious cross references form William Shakespeare to Lord Byron to Sigmund Freud, all of which coalesce masterfully to make a very poignant point, namely that love is wayward, cruel, uncompromising and in the extreme: fatal.(less)

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Jan 30, 2010 Marc rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I finished this short novel/novella (second read-through) earlier tonight. I have much I could say about it, but I feel that if I go into an in-depth analysis of the relationships between the various characters -- Elizabeth (or Lise, the passive-aggressive sister), Paul (her "weak" brother, with whom she shares a "strong physical resemblance"), Gerard (their friend, who is enamored with Paul), Dargelos (with whom Paul is enamored, and who, though off-screen most of the time, is key to the way in...more I finished this short novel/novella (second read-through) earlier tonight. I have much I could say about it, but I feel that if I go into an in-depth analysis of the relationships between the various characters -- Elizabeth (or Lise, the passive-aggressive sister), Paul (her "weak" brother, with whom she shares a "strong physical resemblance"), Gerard (their friend, who is enamored with Paul), Dargelos (with whom Paul is enamored, and who, though off-screen most of the time, is key to the way in which events will unfold), Agatha (an orphan employed as a mannequin when we first meet her, and a tragic figure; she greatly resembles -- physically, that is -- Dargelos, not insignificantly), Michael (the rich Jewish American who makes a brief, but significant, appearance), etc. -- I will ruin this short but amazingly complex work for anyone who wishes to discover it on his/her own.

Suffice it to say that this book will appeal to those who appreciate Greek tragedy tuned to a decidedly modern key (I couldn't help thinking of Alain Robbe-Grillet's The Erasers -- here, as in that work, things already seem to be preordained from early on in the novel, and references to Greek mythological figures occasionally surface as little hints of what's to come). Its central characters are self-absorbed, spoiled, "social misfits"; they are thieves, dreamers whose dreams are unsavory, and love will eventually tear them apart (please allow me the Ian Curtis reference). Any "good" synopsis of the novella would probably talk about the "Room" in which the three -- later four -- perform their childish "plays," about the "Game," about the near-incestuous relationship strongly hinted at between brother/sister (Paul and Elisabeth), about the pranks the children play on others, the rituals and the objects they steal/collect, about the death of various family members and the significance of said deaths, and perhaps even about what happens at the end. But I won't go there. Best to discover these things for oneself.

I might also briefly mention, for those interested in POV, that this novella is written in a close third-person style that allows the narrator to freely weave in and out of the minds of all of the characters, not just the main characters, and also to interject, from time to time, a comment or three of his own (i.e. to remind us that we're watching a bona fide tragedy unfold before our eyes!). Finally, the illustrations, by Cocteau himself, are quite wonderful, and add to the ambience of the narrative.(less)

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Mar 16, 2011 Nate D rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: readers, dreamers

Recommended to Nate D by: Writers No One Reads

Shelves: france, interwar-maladies

Curiously-bonded siblings, freshly orphaned, retreat into a cloistered Game-life of their own making, which barely touches the outside world, but which may incorporate new players. Totally weird, poeticized use of language. Totally weird relationships. But it works.

The central obsession-immolation dynamic (these siblings are like an implicitly incestuous Wuthering Heights -- the center cannot hold and will take everyone else with it) is essentially obvious from the very start, but this is still...more

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Mar 13, 2013 Mark Glover rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Thank god for the 3hr train journey I was forced to undertake due to transport failure as it meant I managed to get through this book in one sitting. While I found the book a but confusing and slow to start with, once I was into it I loved the intensity of the story, while it is a slim book (135 pages) you very quickly become invested in the characters and get drawn into their world. I was interested to read in the author bio that Cocteau was a film maker, while the details were scant, I would s...more

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Aug 29, 2012 Nuria rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Los niños terribles, esta excelente novela que Jean Cocteau escribió en diez y siete días, es una pequeña obra maestra. Rápida de leer por su corta extensión, el lector es inducido a la terrible habitación que habitan estos personajes perversos, amorales, dispuestos a sobrevivir en una niñez cruel, derivada de una infancia que anestesia la vida adulta, que sobrevive al dolor mediante a detalles insignificantes. Una lectura profunda llega a angustiar, ya que nos adentra de lleno en uno de los esp...more

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Mar 09, 2013 Sherry Johnson rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

The first thing that struck me about Jean Cocteau’s Les enfants terribles was the ingenious plot device of one of the main characters, Paul, becoming permanently traumatized by being hit in the chest with a snowball with a rock buried in it. But wait, where had I seen this before? Oh yes - it was also used by Robertson Davies in his Fifth Business trilogy. In Davies’ novel, the snowball hits Mary Dempster by accident, she becomes mentally unstable for life (although admittedly, speculated to be...more

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Mar 19, 2009 Wils Cain rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

The story of two rich siblings suddenly orphaned and slowly alienating themselves from reality as they drift into a fantasy world they created taking place in the Room. Very dark!

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May 17, 2007 Violette rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: french-literature-in-english

From this book I learned that the inner world that many children inhabit, as I remember having done (and I suppose still do at times), can be a truly wonderful as well as a scary place to live (though thank goodness not like the one portrayed in this novel!). Naturally, if I could read and understand French this book would probably have offered me a slightly different experience.

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Aug 11, 2011 Dorian rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: history, children, france, teenagers

I read the Finnish translation of Les Enfants Terribles. First of all, the translation seemed pretty good, it had this early 20th century French feeling all over it, so the reading experience was probably close to how Jean Cocteau meant it to be.

The book tells a story of Paul and Elisabeth, siblings who love each other violently and make a game of bullying each other and their friends. The view of narration varies throughout the book, which gives a wholesome look to the situation, but is also a...more

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May 22, 2012 Emma rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: vive-le-france, weird, translated

Cocteau's velvet words are so beautiful, reading 'les enfants terribles' felt like little kisses on my brain.

Gorgeous sentence after gorgeous sentence took my breath away.The translation by Rosamond Lehmann is a work of art and cocteau's illustrations throughout the book a delight. The book is short at only 183 pages and i could have gobbled it up very quickly but....i took my time and (don't laugh) indulged in all things french and impressionist for the week (Debussy's syrinx even found its way...more

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Jul 15, 2012 MJ Nicholls rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Recommended to MJ by: Gilbert Adair

Shelves: art-or-illustrated, pernod-and-gauloises, novellas

First, Cocteau’s sumptuous, surreal little pearl of a novella, in peerless translation from Rosamond Lehmann. Next, Gilbert Adair’s affectionate rip-off The Holy Innocents (spot the pun). Next, Bernardo Bertalucci’s film The Dreamers, with a screenplay by Gilbert Adair. Next, Gilbert Adair turns his screenplay (or re-edits his original novel) into a novelisation of The Dreamers. Not a dud in the bunch. An Olympic relay of sultry, challenging art. What better?

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Jan 23, 2011 Michelle rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: 2011

Twisted and dark story about two (yes, horrible) children who grow into equally wretched young adults. A hint of Romeo & Juliet with a dash of Flowers in the Attic, there are definitely few sympathetic characters in this story. The two main protagonists, siblings Elisabeth and Paul, invent a (mean, manipulative) "game" that, in the end, is really not a game at all and instead life. I guess that was my takeaway, we're all sort of in our own little self-created game into which we let varying n...more

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Feb 12, 2011 Emm rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: livres-en-français

Before reading this book, I really just considered Cocteau to be a french novelty who made some enchanting films. What an understatement! Coctueau's exploration of myth is so sophisticated and really provocative. Most notably I enjoyed his treatment of Plato's androgyne myth with the titular couple--the incestuous brother and sister. He also manages to capture that other world of adolescence, which he places between the realms of dreams and the imaginary, where the boundaries of death and life a...more

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Jul 28, 2011 Mali Morsky added it

Porazna je činjenica da već godinama tražim dijela ovog autora po knjižnicama. U skupnoj bazi podataka ima ga u NSK, u Splitu, Sisku i sl. ali većinom na francuskom. A najraširenija je njegova poezija u knjizi "Antologija francuskoga pjesništva / sastavili Zvonimir Mrkonjić, Mirko Tomasović ". U GKZD pronašla sam knjigu iz 1957. srpski prijevod - "Derlad", koji uopće nije loš, no određene riječi i izraze nisam razumjela i prema tome nisam uspjela uhvatiti potpuni duh knjige koju je užitak čitati...more

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Jul 15, 2009 Amber rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: read-adult

I get the feeling that Cocteau started with one idea in mind and it slowly transformed, like the visions in his films, into something else.

Still, this is no bad thing. This entire novella reads like a kind of beautiful nightmare, full of strange images, menacing metaphors, and pre-Freudian psychologies.

What I liked best about it, though, was the pitch-perfect representation of child consciousness. Not idyllic, not angelic, not scatter-brained and lisping - but cunning, self-absorbed, trivial, co...more

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Dec 11, 2011 Katyrose rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: adult-fiction

Cocteau walks through mirrors and between the worlds and I am compelled to follow. It is a travesty that the crown he wears -- Poet -- can be claimed by any other. There ought to be a more singular one for him alone, such as the Dalai Lama's title, "Wish-Fulfilling Jewel." Petite Jean, my Immortal Child, I can only genuflect at the alter you created with this most perfect book, in your chapel at Villefranche Su Mer which lives in my heart. <3

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Jul 23, 2012 Suvi rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: 1900-1939, _1001-before-you-die, novels, _france, _favorites

Cocteau's films were familiar to me beforehand (for example the magical La belle et la bête (1946), the best film version of that classic fairy tale), and apparently the same thing applies to this novel: Cocteau's atmospheric stories are nearly impossible to describe with words, you just have to experience them yourself. The dreamlike mood of the story of Elisabeth and Paul takes hold of you, and doesn't let you go until you are in the abyss with them.

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Sep 28, 2008 Felicia added it · review of another edition

Well, if anyone has a Penguin 60 that they'd like to send my way, I'd love it! Didn't realize how scarce those small little snippets have become.

Jean Cocteau. Les Enfants Terribles. I can't remember now why Jean Cocteau is so phenomenal. Is it the Dada movement? Surrealism? I am reading the Holy Terrors now, and even in translation he writes in a full-of-import way. I think, in old age, I'm becoming jaded. Yes, children can be beasts. Often are. Cocteau is writing about childhood, adolescents, t

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Dec 01, 2008 Denis rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Mesmerizing tale by one of France's greatest artists about the bonds that unite a brother and his sister. Cocteau was one of France's most fascinating magician, a man who could do wonders with a pen or a camera, and whose very personal imagination led him to tell subversive, intense, emotional stories that remain very unique. This novel is one of his most brilliant achievements. It's disturbing and haunting in ways that few novels are.

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Jan 29, 2012 Ben rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: epic-weirdness

Gorgeous and umbral, this book is the thing that reminds you of your childhood fever-dreams and nightmares, the puerile indemnity of your every action until maturity...beautiful and seamless, this book is the apotheosis of every attempt at belletristic plot-weaving.

Incredible.

500/5

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