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Roy: Roman
French
- GenresFrance
409 pages, Paperback
First published October 1, 2005
64 people want to read
About the author
Roger Peyrefitte
154 books42 followersBorn in Castres, Tarn to a wealthy family, Peyrefitte went to Jesuit and Lazarist boarding schools and then studied language and literature in Toulouse. After graduating first of his year from Institut d'Études Politiques de Paris in 1930, he worked as an embassy secretary in Athens between 1933 and 1938. Back in Paris, he had to resign in 1940 for personal reasons before being reintegrated in 1943 and finally ending his diplomatic career in 1945. In his novels, he often treated controversial themes and his work put him at odds with the Roman Catholic church.
He wrote openly about his homoerotic experiences in boarding school in his 1944 first novel Les amitiés particulières (Particular Friendships -- a term used in seminaries to refer to friendships seen as too close and exclusive, often incorrectly translated as "Special Friendships"), which won the coveted prix Renaudot in 1945. The book was made into a film of the same name which was released in 1964. On the set, Peyrefitte met the 12 year old Alain-Philippe Malagnac d'Argens de Villèle; Peyrefitte tells the story of their relationship in Notre amour ("Our Love" - 1967) and L'Enfant de cœur ("Child of the Heart" - 1978). Malagnac later married performer Amanda Lear.
A cultivator of scandal, Peyrefitte attacked the Vatican and Pope Pius XII in his book Les Clés de saint Pierre (1953), which earned him the nickname of 'Pope of the Homosexuals'. The publication of the book started a bitter quarrel with François Mauriac. Mauriac threatened to resign from the paper he was working with at the time, L'Express if it did not stop carrying advertisements for the book. The quarrel was exacerbated by the release of the film adaptation of Les amitiés particulières and culminated in a virulent open letter by Peyrefitte in which he accused Mauriac of homophile inclinations and called him a tartuffe. In April 1976, after Pope Paul VI had condemned homosexuality in a homily, Peyrefitte accused him of being a closet homosexual.
In Les Ambassades (1951), he revealed the ins and outs of diplomacy. Peyrefitte also wrote a book full of gossip about Baron Jacques d'Adelswärd-Fersen's exile in Capri (L'Exilé de Capri, 1959) and translated Greek gay love poetry (La Muse garçonnière (The Boyish Muse), Flammarion, 1973).
In his memoirs Propos Secrets, he wrote extensively about his youth, his sex life (homosexual mainly and a few affairs with women), his years as a diplomat, his travels to Greece and Italy and his troubles with the police for sexually harassing male teenagers. He also gave vent to his fierce love of snobbish genealogizing and vitriolic well-documented gossip, writing about famous people of his time such as André Gide, Henry de Montherlant, Jean Cocteau, Jean Genet, Marcel Jouhandeau, Marie-Laure de Noailles, Gaston Gallimard, Jean Paul Sartre, Charles de Gaulle and Georges Pompidou, among many others. Claiming he had reliable sources within the Vatican's "black aristocracy", once again he stated that three recent popes of the 20th century were homosexuals. He particularly loved to expose the hypocrisy and vanity of prominent people, to denounce fake aristocrats and to out closet homosexuals.
Roger Peyrefitte wrote popular historical biographies about Alexander the Great and Voltaire. In Voltaire et Frédéric II he polemically claimed that Voltaire had been the passive lover of Frederick the Great.
In spite of his libertarian views on sexuality, politically Peyrefitte was a conservative bourgeois and in his later years he would support extreme right-winger Jean-Marie Le Pen.
He died at 93 of Parkinson's disease, after receiving the last rites from the Church he had attacked so strongly.
He wrote openly about his homoerotic experiences in boarding school in his 1944 first novel Les amitiés particulières (Particular Friendships -- a term used in seminaries to refer to friendships seen as too close and exclusive, often incorrectly translated as "Special Friendships"), which won the coveted prix Renaudot in 1945. The book was made into a film of the same name which was released in 1964. On the set, Peyrefitte met the 12 year old Alain-Philippe Malagnac d'Argens de Villèle; Peyrefitte tells the story of their relationship in Notre amour ("Our Love" - 1967) and L'Enfant de cœur ("Child of the Heart" - 1978). Malagnac later married performer Amanda Lear.
A cultivator of scandal, Peyrefitte attacked the Vatican and Pope Pius XII in his book Les Clés de saint Pierre (1953), which earned him the nickname of 'Pope of the Homosexuals'. The publication of the book started a bitter quarrel with François Mauriac. Mauriac threatened to resign from the paper he was working with at the time, L'Express if it did not stop carrying advertisements for the book. The quarrel was exacerbated by the release of the film adaptation of Les amitiés particulières and culminated in a virulent open letter by Peyrefitte in which he accused Mauriac of homophile inclinations and called him a tartuffe. In April 1976, after Pope Paul VI had condemned homosexuality in a homily, Peyrefitte accused him of being a closet homosexual.
In Les Ambassades (1951), he revealed the ins and outs of diplomacy. Peyrefitte also wrote a book full of gossip about Baron Jacques d'Adelswärd-Fersen's exile in Capri (L'Exilé de Capri, 1959) and translated Greek gay love poetry (La Muse garçonnière (The Boyish Muse), Flammarion, 1973).
In his memoirs Propos Secrets, he wrote extensively about his youth, his sex life (homosexual mainly and a few affairs with women), his years as a diplomat, his travels to Greece and Italy and his troubles with the police for sexually harassing male teenagers. He also gave vent to his fierce love of snobbish genealogizing and vitriolic well-documented gossip, writing about famous people of his time such as André Gide, Henry de Montherlant, Jean Cocteau, Jean Genet, Marcel Jouhandeau, Marie-Laure de Noailles, Gaston Gallimard, Jean Paul Sartre, Charles de Gaulle and Georges Pompidou, among many others. Claiming he had reliable sources within the Vatican's "black aristocracy", once again he stated that three recent popes of the 20th century were homosexuals. He particularly loved to expose the hypocrisy and vanity of prominent people, to denounce fake aristocrats and to out closet homosexuals.
Roger Peyrefitte wrote popular historical biographies about Alexander the Great and Voltaire. In Voltaire et Frédéric II he polemically claimed that Voltaire had been the passive lover of Frederick the Great.
In spite of his libertarian views on sexuality, politically Peyrefitte was a conservative bourgeois and in his later years he would support extreme right-winger Jean-Marie Le Pen.
He died at 93 of Parkinson's disease, after receiving the last rites from the Church he had attacked so strongly.
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
December 14, 2022
Out skateboarding one night in September 1977, rich 13-year-old schoolboy Roy Clear, “said to be the best-looking boy … in the whole of Los Angeles,” meets and is easily seduced by ugly police chief Jack Sherman, plunging him into fourteen months of increasingly wild adventure, including exclusive prostitution to the rich and famous, and richly varied experimentation with sex and drugs. Though often sensational, the story remains credible in both its plot and the palpable excitement motivating the protagonist.
Roger Peyrefitte had evidently made himself deeply familiar with his setting, since the novel also serves as a detailed description of life in California at a particular time of change, most especially its early gay politics, its religious cults, and, most typically of Peyrefitte, salacious gossip about its celebrities. While most of this is quite interesting, there is so much of it that he falls into the trap, for a novel, of telling rather than showing what it was like.
Readers of Peyrefitte’s bestselling earlier novels, especially the first and best, Special Friendships, with its heart-breakingly authentic depiction of the powerful emotions of an older and younger boy in an unconsummated love affair, may well be startled by the copious and graphic descriptions of Roy’s sexual escapades. Somewhat forewarned, I had hoped that in the hands of a writer so gifted at evoking emotion in beautiful language, the result might be an erotic masterpiece, but it was not. Peyrefitte curiously fails to convey the emotional as opposed to purely physical pleasure and relief, which matters more. Moreover, for me, towards the end, he crosses well beyond that always nebulous and personal border between the erotic and the disgusting with mercifully brief and restrained descriptions of sado-masochism and coprophilia.
The novel is expressly intended as a satire on how “the Americans cover [barbarism] with money.” Brought up to worship money by his ridiculously socially-pretentious parents, Roy resorts to blackmail as well as prostitution and concludes he should only have unremunerated sex with youngsters of his own wealthy class, while Sherman hypocritically persecutes gays not belonging to the super-rich circle he thinks should alone be allowed to indulge themselves. Despite this, there is simultaneously a pervasive sense that Peyrefitte is besotted with America as pioneer of the supposedly ultimate “libertarian revolution” and California in particular as “the freest state” with “the best looking” youngsters, which slightly undermines the point of the satire. Though Roy finally regrets his excesses, he never learns to love, and I could not help wondering whether the great writer had not himself become jaded in choosing such a theme.
Ramsey, Roy’s university-student mentor in gay life, explains to him that every kind of venereal disease “could easily be cured these days. ‘So that’s not a reason,’ he had concluded, ‘to refrain from doing what one wants to do.’ ” Alas. I dread to think what is bound to have happened to many of these young characters all too soon after the story ends. Likewise, one wonders if Peyrefitte, whose personal interest was in the pederastic rather than gay form of homosexuality, would have been enthusiastic chronicling in quite such detail the advances of the gay liberationists of the time if he had realised how catastrophically their struggle would soon end as regards everything he and some of them stood for. What would he have thought of the next generation of gays joining the rabid popular denunciation of pederasty in order to gain the sort of pretentious respectability he was so fond of puncturing, and with the part of the world here depicted very much leading the way?
Though Roy is never moving and hardly inspiring, and I was a little disappointed in my hopes for it, it is still worth reading as an intriguing, mostly lively and well-written story.
No authorized English translation of Roy has ever been published. An anonymous one is circulating online. An extraordinarily generous labour of love, it is excellent so far as I am up to commenting, except that it is too literal with respect to dialogue. Consistently using words like bugger, lorry, wank and (neutrally) negro, Roy sounds more like an Englishman of Peyrefitte’s generation than a Californian boy of the seventies.
Edmund Marlowe, author of Alexander’s Choice, a schoolboy’s love story set six years later at England’s Eton College, https://www.amazon.com/dp/191457107X
Roger Peyrefitte had evidently made himself deeply familiar with his setting, since the novel also serves as a detailed description of life in California at a particular time of change, most especially its early gay politics, its religious cults, and, most typically of Peyrefitte, salacious gossip about its celebrities. While most of this is quite interesting, there is so much of it that he falls into the trap, for a novel, of telling rather than showing what it was like.
Readers of Peyrefitte’s bestselling earlier novels, especially the first and best, Special Friendships, with its heart-breakingly authentic depiction of the powerful emotions of an older and younger boy in an unconsummated love affair, may well be startled by the copious and graphic descriptions of Roy’s sexual escapades. Somewhat forewarned, I had hoped that in the hands of a writer so gifted at evoking emotion in beautiful language, the result might be an erotic masterpiece, but it was not. Peyrefitte curiously fails to convey the emotional as opposed to purely physical pleasure and relief, which matters more. Moreover, for me, towards the end, he crosses well beyond that always nebulous and personal border between the erotic and the disgusting with mercifully brief and restrained descriptions of sado-masochism and coprophilia.
The novel is expressly intended as a satire on how “the Americans cover [barbarism] with money.” Brought up to worship money by his ridiculously socially-pretentious parents, Roy resorts to blackmail as well as prostitution and concludes he should only have unremunerated sex with youngsters of his own wealthy class, while Sherman hypocritically persecutes gays not belonging to the super-rich circle he thinks should alone be allowed to indulge themselves. Despite this, there is simultaneously a pervasive sense that Peyrefitte is besotted with America as pioneer of the supposedly ultimate “libertarian revolution” and California in particular as “the freest state” with “the best looking” youngsters, which slightly undermines the point of the satire. Though Roy finally regrets his excesses, he never learns to love, and I could not help wondering whether the great writer had not himself become jaded in choosing such a theme.
Ramsey, Roy’s university-student mentor in gay life, explains to him that every kind of venereal disease “could easily be cured these days. ‘So that’s not a reason,’ he had concluded, ‘to refrain from doing what one wants to do.’ ” Alas. I dread to think what is bound to have happened to many of these young characters all too soon after the story ends. Likewise, one wonders if Peyrefitte, whose personal interest was in the pederastic rather than gay form of homosexuality, would have been enthusiastic chronicling in quite such detail the advances of the gay liberationists of the time if he had realised how catastrophically their struggle would soon end as regards everything he and some of them stood for. What would he have thought of the next generation of gays joining the rabid popular denunciation of pederasty in order to gain the sort of pretentious respectability he was so fond of puncturing, and with the part of the world here depicted very much leading the way?
Though Roy is never moving and hardly inspiring, and I was a little disappointed in my hopes for it, it is still worth reading as an intriguing, mostly lively and well-written story.
No authorized English translation of Roy has ever been published. An anonymous one is circulating online. An extraordinarily generous labour of love, it is excellent so far as I am up to commenting, except that it is too literal with respect to dialogue. Consistently using words like bugger, lorry, wank and (neutrally) negro, Roy sounds more like an Englishman of Peyrefitte’s generation than a Californian boy of the seventies.
Edmund Marlowe, author of Alexander’s Choice, a schoolboy’s love story set six years later at England’s Eton College, https://www.amazon.com/dp/191457107X
August 27, 2024
“[…] tú, entre todos aquellos jovencitos guapos y ricos, amor mío, porque te considero ya algo mío.” (Página 331).
“-Tú lo poseerás, Otis, mientras él vierte en mi boca su dulce manantial.” (Página 353).
Roy con todos sus amantes nos proporciona unas experiencias que, para el año de su publicación, nos sorprenden y van acompañadas de una ácida crítica a la sociedad norteamericana de los años 70. Además, que Peyreffite retrata a la comunidad gay en la época pre-VIH. Había veces que el libro se me hacía lento pero en general me llevo un buen recuerdo del protagonista, que según los demás personajes era el chico más guapo de toda LA.
“-Tú lo poseerás, Otis, mientras él vierte en mi boca su dulce manantial.” (Página 353).
Roy con todos sus amantes nos proporciona unas experiencias que, para el año de su publicación, nos sorprenden y van acompañadas de una ácida crítica a la sociedad norteamericana de los años 70. Además, que Peyreffite retrata a la comunidad gay en la época pre-VIH. Había veces que el libro se me hacía lento pero en general me llevo un buen recuerdo del protagonista, que según los demás personajes era el chico más guapo de toda LA.
May 27, 2018
Ambientato nella Los Angeles degli anni’70, della liberazione sessuale, questo romanzo racconta il percorso di liberazione di Roy, un ragazzo appena adolescente riassumendo in se tutti gli eccessi di un epoca. Il libro ü molto forte, a tratti violento, ma racconta un periodo molto bene un percorso complesso di presa di coscienza, tra prostituzione, personalità nascoste, e il percorso di coming out di un ragazzo in un momento in cui la visibilità iniziava a essere possibile.
December 28, 2025
Buena novela erótica, además de mucho contexto histórico lgbt Californiano.
September 9, 2015
J'ai trouvai le "Roy" de Roger Peyrefitte par grande coïncidence, une coïncidence assez bizarre, il restant agonisant disons près de poubelles, sur le trottoir avec quelques autres livres et des trucs de maison divers rejetés sur le Boulevard Arago à Paris! Dans mon édition il y a une dédicace apparue peu après la parution du roman même, de l'auteur à quelqu’un dont le nom m'est illisible. J'imagine que le livre compte parmi les objets qu'une famille heritiere rejet d'un père récemment defunt. Ehue fugaces, labuntur anni!
L'historie ici est franchement scabreuse. Il s'agit des aventures (gaies il va sans dire) d'un certain garçon nommé Roy treize ans, très beau, fils des parents qui habitent Beverley Hills, fils des parents très riches. Puisque il s'agit de Roger Peyrefitte, le conte est bien raconté, mais quand on reflechis que le même auteur écrit "Les Amitiés Particulières" on peut être choqué (moi on tous cas le suis) de la transformation d'un narrateur très catholique romaine très baroque en cet raconteur des excès de la révolution gaie en Californie. Ce qui m’intrique, c'est la hypocrisie qui parait foncièrement humain-d’une part pratiquer comme Jack Sherman ici le chef de police de Los Angeles des poursuites gaie comme prédateur sans scrupules et braconnier et corrompeur des gosses et de l'autre part condamneur des pratiques gaies et des mouvements pour les droits de gaies! Et ce qui parait à première vue incroyable est je crois pas de tout éloigne de la vie réale. Surtout dans les États Unis on garde une tradition d’hypocrisie formidable concernant la sexualité. On dit que dans le passé quand un Bible de Gideon se trouvait toujours dans chaque chambre de motel, l'adresse de la maison mal famée la plus proche se trouvait à la fin de la Bible! Quoi qu'il en soit, Roy reste intéressant et montre une perspective non pas édifiante mais comme même assez drôle des mouvements de libération sexuel sous la soleil de Californie dans les années soixante dix. Si on devient plus sympathique a la cause dont ce roman se traite, est une autre paire de manches.
L'historie ici est franchement scabreuse. Il s'agit des aventures (gaies il va sans dire) d'un certain garçon nommé Roy treize ans, très beau, fils des parents qui habitent Beverley Hills, fils des parents très riches. Puisque il s'agit de Roger Peyrefitte, le conte est bien raconté, mais quand on reflechis que le même auteur écrit "Les Amitiés Particulières" on peut être choqué (moi on tous cas le suis) de la transformation d'un narrateur très catholique romaine très baroque en cet raconteur des excès de la révolution gaie en Californie. Ce qui m’intrique, c'est la hypocrisie qui parait foncièrement humain-d’une part pratiquer comme Jack Sherman ici le chef de police de Los Angeles des poursuites gaie comme prédateur sans scrupules et braconnier et corrompeur des gosses et de l'autre part condamneur des pratiques gaies et des mouvements pour les droits de gaies! Et ce qui parait à première vue incroyable est je crois pas de tout éloigne de la vie réale. Surtout dans les États Unis on garde une tradition d’hypocrisie formidable concernant la sexualité. On dit que dans le passé quand un Bible de Gideon se trouvait toujours dans chaque chambre de motel, l'adresse de la maison mal famée la plus proche se trouvait à la fin de la Bible! Quoi qu'il en soit, Roy reste intéressant et montre une perspective non pas édifiante mais comme même assez drôle des mouvements de libération sexuel sous la soleil de Californie dans les années soixante dix. Si on devient plus sympathique a la cause dont ce roman se traite, est une autre paire de manches.
June 3, 2015
Denso, muy denso. Pero al terminar te queda la sensación de haber leído un gran libro.
Escrito con mucha libertad, difícil de olvidar.
Escrito con mucha libertad, difícil de olvidar.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews