Το λευκό βιβλίο

by Jean Cocteau

Από το 1928 το «Λευκό Βιβλίο», που γαλούχησε γενιές ομοφιλόφυλων, ένθερνων, κατά τα άλλα, υποστηρικτών του συγγραφέα των «Τρομερών Παιδιών», που πέθενε το 1963, έκανε μια μισολαθραία καριέρα, καλυμμένο κάτω από μια ανωνυμία. Το 1970, ο Μπερνάρ Λαβίλ το ξανατύπωσε.
Σημασία πάνω απ’ όλα έχει το περιεχόμενο του «Λευκού Βιβλίου», το περιεχόμενό του, τόσο μεστό, τόσο αληθινό, τόσο τραγικά ερεθιστικό σε μερικά κεφάλαια, ή σπαραχτικά τραγικό σε κάποια άλλα.

Genres: LGBT, Fiction, Queer, France, Classics, Gay, French Literature

86 pages, Unknown Binding

First published January 1, 1927

About the author

Jean Maurice Eugène Clément Cocteau (5 July 1889 – 11 October 1963) was a French poet, novelist, dramatist, designer, boxing manager, playwright and filmmaker. Along with other Surrealists of his generation (Jean Anouilh and René Char for example) Cocteau grappled with the "algebra" of verbal codes old and new, mise en scène language and technologies of modernism to create a paradox: a classical avant-garde. His circle of associates, friends and lovers included Jean Marais, Henri Bernstein, Colette, Édith Piaf, whom he cast in one of his one act plays entitled Le Bel Indifferent in 1940, and Raymond Radiguet.

His work was played out in the theatrical world of the Grands Theatres, the Boulevards and beyond during the Parisian epoque he both lived through and helped define and create. His versatile, unconventional approach and enormous output brought him international acclaim.

Reviews

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

I will say that this is not a perfect book, but a book which I am glad and changed because I have read it. While it is perhaps overly simplistic, melodramatic, and perhaps not comprehensive enough in it's characters, it is a book which speaks from a true and wounding personal honesty which I believe it rare in many novels, even ones which are my favorites. It relates the experience of a man, in agony and confusion over his sexuality, stripped of artistry and moral-overbearing (albeit somewhat rife with stereotyping). In Proust we find homosexuality painted over, we find Proust's male lovers turned into mannish women, we find the grotesque pervert of Charlus, the sadistic lesbianism of Vinteuil's daughter, etc. While I still believe the truest account of the homosexual love experience is Proust's narrator's love for Albertine, it is impossible to consider it without also acknowledging the gender-bending, and artistic dishonesty of that portrayal. While Proust out-achieves in philosophic truth, in artistic mastery, and aesthetic jouissance, it is Cocteau's slim Le Livre Blanc ("The White Book") which bares his own soul and experience with no masks of garrish making-up.

The story is simple: the narrator falls in and out of infatuation with a series of men, all of his homosexual adventures end in disaster and usually death, leaving the narrator feeling lost and alone. He ultimately retreats from a society which hates and misunderstands him. His primary struggle, as an aesthete, is reconciling his homosexual longings with the aesthetic image of heterosexual love: the two are not compatible. His desires are obtusely unfitting with his ideas about love, as he has learned them from a society largely heterosexual, and only containing secret veins of homosexuality. In Kierkegaard's Seducer's Diary, he explains: A perfect kiss requires that the agents be a girl and a man. A man-to-man kiss is in bad taste, or, worse yet, it tastes bad. Love between men is not a normal thing in the narrator's society (nor is it even today, though it is tolerated and largely accepted as a marginal faction), it is "in bad taste - it tastes bad" - there is something unnatural about it, because nature as society has constructed love is between man and woman. Their parts fit. It is natural.

A gay man can read and love and empathize with Jane Eyre, or Wuthering Heights, Madame Bovary or any other novel, which is decidedly written by and for the hetero-normative majority. Why is this? "Because love is love" people say. But I think it is hard for straight people to read, love, and empathize with gay literature. Not because it is not love, but because it is love translated into a language which they do not understand. It is reading a novel in translation, there are bits of the personal artistry, some of the colloquial truth, which is lost in the mechanic process of translation. "Love" has attracted to itself and engendered centuries of discourse, vertiginous heights of poetry and art, which have built it into something nearly incomprehensible. It is accepted and absorbed as abstract, as inevitable, as true. But that is not the case for homosexuality, which remains nascent in the collective mind and culture, remains fringe and marginal.

Being a gay man is a unique social Odyssey. It is unlike being a woman, and unlike being of non-white ethnic color, unlike being physically or diagnostically mentally handicap. Like the Biblical Esther, whose Jewness is not seen and must be vocalized by her, gayness is neither seen nor strictly detectable. It is a true Odyssey - a journey of self-discovery and of regaining your own Ithaka which you have been cast away from by society, on the waters of what is "normal." Even growing up in New England, it is a singular experience to know that there are people in the world who would hate you if they knew - and that you have a perverse and subversive power to reveal the truth: to be or not to be? There is a sovereignty of the mind which gives you the power to determine who you are to whom: a choice which many people need not worry about. You cannot "come out" as black, nor as a woman - it is in the open, it is known. While the struggles of those other oppressed peoples are real, and perhaps in many ways externally worse, it is a unique dilemma of homosexual people (and I can only speak to the male experience) to struggle with the internal demons of who you are, of rationalizing and categorizing, despairing and accepting your emotional, physical, and romantic desires.

Cocteau's narrator notes: “I suppose the artists invented the firm breasts they put on women, and that in reality all women had flabby ones.” It is the collective history of art and society which tells us what love is or is not supposed to be. And by the atavistic definitions we mold and imagine our loves to fit those immortal constructs. But what is a gay man to do in the face of such narrow and incompatible definitions? He must redefine love, or he must settle for the image of love rather than the reality. If Tolstoy is right, that there are as many kinds of loves as there are hearts, then how many people are settling for history's and art's image of love, rather than discovering their own reality of love? Le Livre Blanc is not the story of a gay man finding love, but rather the discovery of a man that his love is not the same love that he has been taught, that love is manifold. That love is a universal truth, but one which has engendered infinite manifestations and varieties. This is not a feel-good novel with trite moralizing, but rather the pained and impassioned struggle and persistent (even at the end) confusion of a man beset against what he has absorbed from society as "normal" and as "real" - he does not find true love, he finds failure and struggle, he finds fleeting images, throbs of physical and emotional stirring, but ultimately he is yet to manifest his own definitions.

[Matteo Fumagalli · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Comunque sia partirò e lascerò questo libro. Se viene trovato, lo si pubblichi. Forse aiuterà a capire che, esiliandomi, non mando in esilio un mostro, ma un uomo al quale la società non permette di vivere poiché considera errore uno dei misteriosi ingranaggi del capolavoro divino.
Un vizio della società fa della rettitudine un vizio. Mi ritiro. Ma non accetto di esser tollerato. Ciò offende il mio amore per l'amore e la libertà."

[Steve · Rating 2 out of 5]

Actually, 2.5 stars...

Jean Cocteau (1889-1963), the fabulously multi-talented writer, artist and film maker, never officially recognized Le livre blanc as his work (he said he didn't want to upset his mother), but to anyone familiar with his poetics it is clearly his. He was concerned about his mother's humor because the topic of this book is growing up and living as a homosexual man. At the time, the nicest word used to describe homosexuals was invertis ( inverts ); homosexuality was not illegal in France (though inverts were strongly discriminated against), whereas it was still actively prosecuted in the lovely anglo-saxon world.

The first person narrator begins with his childhood, recounting a few unmistakable signs of his tendencies to "inversion". When puberty arrives, the jig is well and truly up: I'm not sure if French classrooms were quite so wild, but according to the narrator, "The classroom smelt of gas, chalk and sperm."(*) He falls in love with a more physically mature boy named Dargelos (a name readers of Cocteau will recognize, and whose description will also be recognized by those familiar with Cocteau's drawings). However, in this book Dargelos dies in consequence of a foolish swim in an icy Seine.(**)

In a sensitive, flexible prose Cocteau takes us through the life of a boy who cannot understand himself because he is unspeakable - he is presented with gargoylish images of himself, if the matter is even permitted to be brought up. (Though this side of the matter is largely passed over in this book.) How many such stories do we already know? Speaking for myself, probably hundreds.

But the narrator's story is just a bit more complicated than the standard gay coming-of-age story. For example, he tries a mistress, Jeanne, who was simultaneously being kept by a wealthy Armenian (who knew about the narrator's relationship with Jeanne) and whom the narrator caught in bed with another woman... Also, he frequents another prostitute "for appearances" but is being shagged by her pimp... It gets even more complicated.

After the boy became a young man, there was apparently no limit to the opportunities for gay sex, particularly for a young man with money; the problem was finding love. Whether due to fate or bad luck, the narrator was doomed. But in one encounter he met a Dargelos-like sailor by whom he was absolutely smitten, and evidently so was the sailor by him. After a passionate night, the narrator walks away mumbling some nonsense to himself and never returns to his sobbing sailor. At this point at the latest, it became clear to me that this story is less of a tale about a gay human being and more of an anthropological study of all the ways a young, rich, gay stereotype can get into trouble.

The story told in this book is melodramatic, since it is told quickly and is full of what would appear to me as rather extreme situations, but it is entertaining. However, it seems to suggest that inverts must move from sexual encounter to sexual encounter and remain unhappy and unfulfilled.

And then he turns to God... Ah, but the Abbé he turns to for spiritual guidance, and with whom he exchanges elevated words, brings his thoughts to less spiritual matters. After a treacherous lover dies from a drug addiction and the brother of his new fiancée (the narrator is having an affair with the brother) shoots himself after a confrontation, the narrator considers withdrawing to a life of meditation in a monastery. Except that the young monk who takes him to the abbott reminds him of Dargelos. So the narrator "departs" and "withdraws from this society". Where to? No idea. The narrator concludes with noble words which ring very hollow in my ears.

So, Cocteau's "gay man" is, in the end, a pretentious aesthete who is constantly in heat. Still, that is much better than Proust's horrible, manipulative pervert Charlus. The story is entertaining, but it isn't much of a white paper. Don't worry, Cocteau wrote much better books than this!

(*) I recall the wonderful film "Zéro de conduite", by Jean Vigo, set at a time not much later than this book, so perhaps they really were that wild. No, that film was liberationist fantasy; of course, the Vichy government banned the movie. If you haven't seen it, try to find it. I love it. And "La guerre des boutons", too.

(**) This is the only book of Cocteau in which Dargelos dies.

[Erik · Rating 5 out of 5]

Jean Cocteau's The White Paper is a classic of queer literature that I will return to over and over again. The book is sexy, romantic, emotional, and far ahead of its time, and I feel fortunate to have found a copy of this classic.

Though originally written under a pseudonym, The White Paper starts with Cocteau's youth in the country where he soon realized he was attracted to men and describes male bodies in a way that is both beautiful and erotic. Each of the loves he describes in this book - from a one-night stand with a sailor to a tryst with a man who is confused about his own sexuality - resonates even today with a new-centuried audience, and the book itself is truly a queer treasure.

[Patrick Doyle · Rating 5 out of 5]

One summer when I was a kid, my mother signed me up for art lessons. It wasn’t so much to cultivate my talent but to get me out of the house. All summer I’d fought joining the baseball team and my father was fed up. Luckily (for me probably) I was interested. The lessons were given by nuns, but I had to go downtown to take them. But the lessons sucked. We all sat in rows in a windowless basement while wimpled gargoyles told us what to draw.

One day on the way back (bus, streetcar, bus), I passed a second-hand bookstore. It was wonderfully seedy. There were acres of books shelved in no particular order that I could see. One book caught my eye. It was a small hardcover with a dust jacket featuring a drawing of a man doing something very strange. The strangeness disappeared when I flipped it open. I was looking at the first homoerotic drawings, other than my own.

Although I had the dollar scribbled on the inside front cover, I wasn’t sure if the clerk would sell it to me. But he didn’t bat an eye. I was tall for my age. As I left the store with my discovery hidden away, I felt like a smuggler from the real world to me. Not the kind of art my mother had in mind. I kept going to the lessons to get the parents off my back. I went back to the bookstore a few times, too, but I never found another book like this. It took me a while to appreciate the story, but it didn’t take me long to appreciate the drawings.

About the book. It’s a 1958 edition published by The Macaulay Company and is the one pictured here. Famously, Jean Cocteau did not claim authorship. Strangely, with this edition, neither does the translator. The translation is awkward. Technically, each word is correct but the sense gets lost. Sometimes poetry is used to dissimulate. Cocteau was making a confession but hiding it too. If you can ignore the fact it’s about an upper-class brat toying with hustlers and then dumping them, the story is compelling. There’s a lot of pain here, but you barely notice because the telling is so frothy and the words are so big. Poetry has many functions.

[Jesse · Rating 4 out of 5]

Was hoping this would click a little more with me on a revisit, but I just don't respond to it the same way I do to so much of JC's other artistic output. Even considered within its historical context it just doesn't quite go there enough; I'm inclined to think that having to cloak his obsessions in codedness, metaphor, & surrealism actually allowed Cocteau to be much more subversive, imaginative, & ultimately interesting on topics of queer sexuality than he ever is here, when the topic is addressed directly.

Still, I always welcome an appearance by Dargelos—one of the queer canon's great obsessions & gay primal scenes—& there are enough characteristically lovely passages & whimsical turns of phrase to make it an always-pleasant lark of a read.

But what I truly love most of all is my little English language 1st edition copy, purely as an object: its diminutive size, the texture of the yellowed paper, the sexy illustrations (which really do rank among JC's very, very best).

"The privileges of beauty are immense. It gains its way even with those who seem the least responsive to it."

[Andreas Selvig · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very gay and very good. Romantic, melodramatic, sexy, over the top, but with a kernel of something true and relatable. In 1928 Cocteau walked so the rest of us could run

[daph pink ♡ · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book is all style, no soul.

Cocteau tries to be deep and poetic, but it comes off as fake and full of itself. The story, if you can call it that, is a dull ramble about fleeting affairs and vague sadness, written like he’s trying way too hard to impress someone at a pretentious Paris café.

For a book about queer desire, it’s shockingly cold. The people he “loves” feel more like props than real humans. Nothing really happens, and yet somehow it still manages to drag.

Short book, long read, zero impact.

Skip it.

[Brodolomi · Rating 5 out of 5]

a) Bela knjiga je Koktoov homoerotski brevijar. Deo liturgijskog dekadetnog kanona francuske književnosti. U ovim liturgijskim tekstovima sveci su uvek delikatne estete, a Bog je lepota. Svi bogovi, pa i ovaj, vole krv.

b) Igra je u sledećem: neimenovani mladić ostavlja u vidu nepotpisane knjige niz sećanja na svoje seksualne žudnje prema muškarcima (i jednoj lezbejki). Brevijar je nasilno kratak. 40 stranica je moglo da bude rašireno na 400, a da mi ne bude dosadno. Ipak, Kokto je hteo da erotsko zadovoljstvo čitanja bude brzo i nabijeno, kao seks na brzinu (seks u letu) koji praktikuje junak.

C) Junak je biće kome je potrebno da stvara opsesije i pripada kultovima. Junak voli da opsesivno obožava Darželesa, potom obožava Alfreda, pa Žanu, Gistava, ZLOSRETNIKA; H-a, itd. Oni su svi varijacije jedne iste lepote, što junak i sam priznaje na kraju. Kada nema pred sobom varijaciju, onda se okreće obožavanju Boga. Ali za njega između Darželesa i Boga nema prave razlike. Obojica su tu da budu surovi i da budu obožavani.

D) Hriščanstvo: Crkva – ponavljao je taj ljupki jeretik – od nas zahteva moralnu prozodiju ekvivaletnu prozodiji jednog Boaloa

E) Paganizam: Sunce je stari ljubavnik koji zna svoju ulogu.

F) Uprkos prilepljenom završetku, ne verujem u angažovanu prirodu ovog romana. U predstavljenom svetu nema zaista društvene represije, a i kad je ima, ona je deo erotskog rituala podređivanja. Junak voli da kleči pred Darželesom i njegovim varijacijama. Kada oni počnu da kleče pred njim, on gubi interesovanje.

G) Ovaj prevod je štampan sa pogovorom Dominika Fernandeza. Pogovor je neverovatno vulgaran. Rado bih ga iscepao.

[Liam Ostermann · Rating 5 out of 5]

It is an odd little book (I am referring here specifically to this edition from Brilliance books which was the first UK English language paperback edition - 1983 - which says a great deal about how 'gay' books were ostensibly available but in reality largely unavailable, and thus invisible, if you were young, poor gay person not living in London or similar large city) and I am giving five stars because of its historical interest and because of its illustrations (although only a selection, and in black and white, of the thirty odd colour colour prints that adorned the illustrateed french edition).

It is a short and slight tale and I want to quote Rictor Norton in 'Gay Love Letters through the Centuries' on 'Livre Blanc' before I say anything:

"... it is essentially a "white paper" on injustice, an early sexual-political analysis of how guilt and shame are internalised in response to the homophobia of peer groups and the agents of social oppression such as teachers: "My misfortunes are due to a society which condemns anything out of the ordinary as a crime and forces us to reform our natural inclinations." The first half of the book documents the dynamics of self-oppression, for example how the narrator pretends to share the heterosexual enthusiasms of his school friends and thus "began to falsify my nature," leading to affairs with women. The second half of the book is an affirmation of homosexuality, when he realises he has taken a wrong turning and "vowed that I would not get lost again." But it also shows how most gay relationships during this period were "doomed to failure" because of self-loathing and social injustice...The last pages are swamped by self pity but nevertheless express one of the key sentiments that prompted the Gay Liberation movement: "I will not agree to be tolerated. This damages my love of love and of liberty."

That statement "I will not agree to be tolerated" has a powerful resonance for me because I read them not long after beginning to break free of the closet I hid myself in, not because of persecution, but because the alternative, benign 'tolerance' was unacceptable. Tolerance was amply expressed by all liberal sections of society by the 1970's but the reality was you were regarded in the same light as all the other 'tolerated groups' black people, reformed thieves and unmarried mothers. But those tolerant people no-more wanted the blacks living next door, or to leave reformed thieves alone with their bibelots or their teenage sons alone with an unmarried woman or a queer. Tolerance only meant that you weren't going to be immediately attacked and allowed a circumscribed entry into their lives but ultimately when the queer-bashers knocked out your teeth it was your fault for being a filthy beast. Learning to reject not only society's hatred but its 'tolerance' took time.

So back to 'The White Paper' it is incredibly short and in parts excellent, particularly the opening parts which certainly appear to have a link with Cocteau own schooldays and adolescence but parts of it are clumsily pornographic and the discussions with a catholic abbe about life and love are hard to take seriously and more than anything else date the work. The affinity for literary queers in the UK and France for the Catholic Church always struck me as odd but as a cradle catholic I also thought that maybe the catholic interpretation of forgiveness, etc. had a compelling force. Nowadays I just think it was a case of pedes and tapetts recognising each other (check your French-English dictionaries for definitions)*. I have almost zero patience with either the old fashioned religiosity of Cocteau or the modern gays who are going to and financially supporting gay christian churches**. The church was also a source of patronage - I wonder how many people know that the French Church just off Leicester Square in London is decorated with murals and artwork by Cocteau?

This little book also has to be seen as part of Cocteau's oeuvre and also of the special place France and French literature had for English queers. France under Napoleon had decriminalised homosexual acts but that didn't mean tolerance, if you were queer there were plenty of laws they could get you with if they wanted***. But it is perfectly true that far more open and widespread literature with a discussion of sexual matters was possible in France than the UK - it is not surprising that it took over thirty years for a English translation to be published in the UK. But it remained a schizophrenic culture full of evasions and hypocrisies. What is perhaps most annoying to a modern reader is that although Cocteau always refused to acknowledge his authorship, he allowed 'Livre Blanc' to be listed amongst his 'complete works' but was not published as part of them. Everyone in France knew that Cocteau was a complete pedes but he had to pretend otherwise so as to ensure his election to the Academe Francais. Rather like Somerset Maugham self censoring himself because he wanted (but never received) the Order of Merit. I cannot understand the obsession with these honours and baubles by artists, how many people in the UK can tell you anything about the Order of Merit? or even know of its existence?

Even as a flawed work 'The White Paper' is worth reading, faults and all, because Cocteau, faults and all, was an extraordinary artist and one we all should read more of.

*Totally off the point but of all the miracles that the Catholic Church has garbed itself in with the misdirection of a master magician the most amazing is that for two thousand years they convinced us that an all male institution which dressed themselves and adolescent boys in elaborate lace garments was full of heterosexual males and that any suggestion to the contrary was a malicious attack.
**Sorry to go off topic again but I wonder how far from self loathing have we come when so many of us still can't wait to go back into the same institutions that persecuted and hated and than only tolerated us for so long. Why are we filling their empty pews now that the straights have deserted them?
***Which is what English 'homosexuals' discovered after decriminalisation in 1967. It is often forgotten that more men were prosecuted for a wider variety of sexual crimes after 1967 than before. Touching, not even going so far as to hold hands or kiss, was a public order offence and the police used it extensively - a policeman's word was taken as gospel (and was as likely to be as much a lie) - and as the act only covered acts committed in 'private' and private didn't include hotel rooms or even multi-occupied buildings - the scope for persecution was enormous.

[João Roque · Rating 5 out of 5]

Uma das coisas que me fizeram gostar muito deste livro de Jean Cocteau, o primeiro que leio do autor, é a tradução e principalmente a apresentação da obra de Aníbal Fernandes.
Quer de início, onde nos situa no universo de Cocteau, quer no final, onde resume em poucas páginas as cinco últimas paixões do académico francês, AF é muito hábil nas suas descrições que intercala com frases e mesmo pequenos textos do autor.
Quanto ao livro propriamente dito, pois é tudo o que eu esperava de um autor multifacetado, do qual conhecia já essencialmente a sua arte de desenhador e também a contribuição vasta e diversificada que deu ao cinema e teatro.
Em "O Livro Branco", Cocteau rompe completamente certos tabus, até então apenas aqui e ali quebrados, em França, sobre a homossexualidade em nome próprio. Daí a dificuldade que o livro teve em aparecer devidamente publicado.
É um deleite ler a descrição feita pelo autor das suas complicadas e tantas vezes dramáticas da sua trajectória sexual, mas sempre feita de uma forma escorreita, linear e acima de tudo natural.

[Eadweard · Rating 3 out of 5]

" The arched bodies are riveted together at the sex; grave profiles cast thoughtful downward glances, turn less quickly than the tripping and now and then plodding feet. Free hands assume the gracious attitudes affected by common folk when they take a cup of tea or piss it out again. A springtime exhilaration transports the bodies. Those bodies bud, push forth shoots, branches, hard members bump, squeeze, sweats commingle, and there's another couple heading for one of the rooms with the globe lights overhead and the eiderdowns on the bed. "
----



" The sun is a veteran lover who knows his job. He starts by laying firm hands all over you. He attacks simultaneously from every angle. There's no getting away, he has a potent grip, he pins you and before you know it, you discover, as always happens to me, that your belly is covered with liquid drops similar to mistletoe. "

[Cody · Rating 5 out of 5]

CLEANING UP THE HOUSE/KEEPING 8 YEARS AFTER THE FACT, 2025 ed.


A perfect novel. A work of immense import rendered in the exquisite miniatures of Minimalism. A seminal book.


One of those sentences is a pun.

[Jonathan · Rating 5 out of 5]

A brilliant little book. Anger, love, violence and longing. A complete contrast to modern romantic gay fiction, and despite it never being formally acknowledged by Cocteau, unmistakeably him.

[Laurent De Maertelaer · Rating 3 out of 5]

"Men heeft beweerd dat 'Het Witboek' van mijn hand is. Ik neem aan dat dat de reden is waarom u mij vraagt het te illusteren en waarom ik uw voorstel aanneem.
Het ziet er inderdaad naar uit dat de schrijver 'Le grand écart' en mijn werk niet slecht vindt.
Maar hoe gunstig ik ook denk over dit boek - of het nu al of niet van mij is -, ik wil er niet mijn naam onder zetten omdat het dan een autobiografie zou worden, en ik behoud me het recht voor mijn eigen autobiografie te schrijven, die nog veel opmerkelijker zal zijn. Ik zal daarom slechts via de tekeningen mijn waardering uiten voor deze anonieme poging een terrein te ontginnen dat al te zeer is verwaarloosd.
Jean Cocteau
mei 1930"
En daarmee is alles gezegd over deze korte, poëtische klassieker van de herenliefde (zie ook Luc Boudens' 'Op eenzame hoogte').

[M. G. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Once, a Narcissus who pleased himself approached his mouth to the mirror, pressed his lips to it and pressed his adventure with himself all the way through to the end. Invisible like the Greek gods, I put my lips to his and imitated his gestures. Never was he to know that instead of reflecting him, the mirror had acted, had lived and loved him.

Interesting to see some veritably ancient gay lit that criticizes the tired story of tolerance.

[Pate Duncan · Rating 4 out of 5]

A solid 35-40% of this is banger quotes. The other portion is Cocteau being the messiest, most unfortunate gay guy this side of having tried to reinstate the emperor in Japan. Amazed that Almodóvar lifted the early bathing/fainting scene in Pain and Glory from this.

[Keith · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love Cocteau - his movies, his writing and his hot doodles of naked men!

[Swrang Varma · Rating 4 out of 5]

"But I'm not willing just to be tolerated. That wounds my love of love and of liberty”

[Ángel Agudo · Rating 4 out of 5]

«En vez de adoptar el evangelio de Rimbaud: He aquí el tiempo de los asesinos, la juventud hubiera hecho mejor recordando la frase: Hay que reinventar el amor.»

[seray · Rating 3 out of 5]

keşke çocukken okusaydım, ne kadar etkilenirdim. ama bu kadar net bir şekilde gey olduğunu belirtip o kimliğin derinine inmiyor, orasını sevmedim. biraz çiğ bırakıyor kitabı

[Elisa · Rating 3 out of 5]

"Il libro bianco" è un racconto di formazione sentimentale e sessuale fortemente autobiografico che percorre la vita del protagonista dall'infanzia all'inizio dell'età adulta. Insieme ad esso sono raccolti alcuni scritti erotici dello stesso periodo o che fanno riferimento allo stesso contesto (poesie e brevi apologhi). Purtroppo l'edizione italiana della Guanda non contiene anche i 18 disegni dell'autore che invece compaiono nell'originale.
Ciò che narra Cocteau è lo scarto che intercorre tra il formarsi di una sessualità che all'epoca era considerata normale e quella invece omosessuale: si tratta di un racconto denso di sofferenza, una sorta di via crucis in cui ogni tappa è rappresentata da un amante diverso e quindi da un raggiro e un dolore più grande, un susseguirsi di piaceri unicamente carnali che non trovano una controparte spirituale, psicologica ed emotiva, accompagnati solo da senso di colpa e di inadeguatezza.
La vita di un "invertito" sembra potersi comporre solo di bugie, finzioni e doppiezze; quello che io ho percepito è un continuo senso di tensione e insoddisfazione verso se stessi, l'ansia di provare ad essere come gli altri, sapendo fin dall'inizio di andare incontro al fallimento. Il protagonista cerca rifugio nella fede, ma anche lì è costretto ad essere perseguitato dai propri fantasmi, non riesce a liberarsi della propria identità e, poiché non è in grado di rientrare nei canoni della società, di annullarsi, l'unica soluzione possibile è di abbandonarla e di dedicarsi ad una vita di solitudine e di autoesclusione.
Si tratta di uno dei racconti più amari, disperati, avviliti e sconfortanti che io abbia mai letto. Il contesto è deprimente, umiliante e squallido e mi ha provocato più che altro angoscia.
Ciò che invece ho trovato molto interessante è la lettura che si può fare quasi in parallelo di questo racconto e de "I ragazzi terribili", sono più che evidenti i punti in comune dei due testi e il rimacinare degli stessi temi che tornano a perseguitare ossessivamente Cocteau: il doppio, la coppia dei fratelli, Dargelos e il "tipo" che incarna, sia esso maschile o femminile, e la sua continua ricerca o apparizione improvvisa (si ritrova perfino l'episodio della palla di neve).

[Francesco Tenaglia · Rating 3 out of 5]

elegant formal solutions and formidable expressive conciseness. as with other works, I do not find really exciting his emphasis on an almost dreamlike lightness that brings with it a lot of common sense, an almost prefabricated sense of things
I wish l loved him more.

[Dan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Acquired 1989
Gift from Anthony

[KATZE]

The anonymity provokes a tragic honestly. The words dance across every last page, charming the reader the whole way through.

[Jack Watson · Rating 5 out of 5]

From the foreword: “Only Cocteau could have written it with such dramatic intensity, transforming what might otherwise have been an erotic fantasy into a poetic reality.”

killer book jean

[Louise · Rating 5 out of 5]

Cocteau met des mots poétiques et pudiques sur ses aventures homosexuelles, commençant par ses premiers coups de coeur adolescents jusqu'à ses expériences érotiques, parfois sordides, souvent lumineuses. Les métaphores élégantes se succèdent et même si le récit est très linéaire, Cocteau réussit admirablement bien à parler de lui, mêlant érotisme et pudeur. C'est très beau.

[Oliver Terrones · Rating 5 out of 5]

Del deseo homosexual, sus encarnaciones, traducciones y padecimientos; pero también de ese modo de hablar (sin hablar) del encuentro sexual propio de la represión o la poesía. No sé por qué no lo había leído.

"Una vez, un Narciso que se gustaba acercó la boca al espejo, la pegó en él y llevó hasta el final la aventura consigo mismo. Invisible como los dioses griegos, apoyé mis labios contra los suyos e imité sus ademanes. Nunca supo que en vez de reflejar, el espejo actuaba, que estaba vivo y que lo había amado."

[Jesús de la Garza · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hay que reinventar el amor.

[Raylin Pujols · Rating 4 out of 5]

Turbio.