Geoff’s Reviews > Jean Cocteau: A Life > Status Update

High society in the Belle Époque was so f-in weird. You can only really see them as some kind of zoological species.

This chapter on Cocteau and Proust's early relationship - very very good - Proust already two years deep in writing A la recherche, Cocteau the young darling of the art world - Proust's ironic chastisement of Cocteau's airy desire to be the center of that Society which he was already inscribing as the "kingdom of nothing" in his great book. Proust's letters to C are as densely written as his novel.

No doubt some critics will have issue with Arnaud's extravagances and partisanship in favor of Cocteau, but man I am enjoying this - Arnaud's thought and prose is downright elegant, and young Cocteau is endlessly fascinating.

This book is such perfect escapism - I'm back in the Belle Époque with the homosexual aesthete class, the decadent artists and theater crowd, Proust's salons and the enacting of strange cultural rituals, artifice in the service of enlightenment, life as a grand bizarre staging of extreme pleasures and petty snobberies, and the impending Dreyfus affair, WWI looming obliquely...

These early pages are outstandingly written/translated. I adore novels of early childhood, and the language here is certainly novelesque. No dry recitation of facts - Arnaud can craft prose!

Got sucked in and read the intro - Arnaud is clearly a partisan on the side of "Cocteau is a genius and his detractors are fools" but the man can write - lovely and passionate so far...