All the King's Horses [Semiotext(e) / Native Agents]

by Michèle Bernstein, John Kelsey (Introduction), Odile Passot (Afterword)

"What are you working on, exactly? I have no idea."
"Reification," he answered.
"It's a serious job," I added.
"Yes, it is," he said.
"I see," Carole observed with admiration. "Serious work, at a huge desk cluttered with thick books and papers."
"No," said Gilles. "I walk. Mainly I walk."

Michèle Bernstein's first novel, All the King's Horses (1960), is one of the odder and more elusive, entertaining, and revealing documents of the Situationist International. At the instigation of her first husband, Guy Debord, Bernstein agreed to write a potboiler to help swell the Situationist International's coffers. When she objected to the idea of practicing a "dead art," Debord suggested that it would be instead be détournement—the Situationist reuse of media toward different, subversive, ends.

Inspired by the pseudo-scandalous success of Roger Vadim's filmed version of Choderlos de Laclos's Les Liaisons Dangereuses and the adolescent Françoise Sagan's bestselling novel Bonjour tristesse, Bernstein lampooned and borrowed from both Sagan and de Laclos, concocting a roman à clef that succeeded on several levels. A moneymaker for the most radical front of the French avant-garde, the novel (by its very success) demonstrated the bankruptcy of contemporary French letters and the Situationist contempt for the psychological novel, while (perhaps unintentionally) holding up a playful mirror to the private lives of two of the Situationist International's most important members.

All the King's Horses is a slippery rewrite of Les Liaisons Dangereuses with Debord playing the role of cold libertine, Bernstein as his cohort, and disguised walk-on roles by the likes of the painter Asger Jorn and others. Though Greil Marcus sparked interest in this novel in his 1989 book Lipstick Traces, All the King's Horses remained unavailable until its 2004 republication in France.

This Semiotext(e) edition is its first translation into English.

Genres: Fiction, Philosophy, Literature, France, Classics, Novels

143 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1960

About the author

Michèle Bernstein (born 28 April 1932) is a French novelist and critic, most usually remembered as a member of the Situationist International from its foundation in 1957 until 1967, and as the wife of its most prominent member, Guy Debord.

Early years
Bernstein was born in Paris, of Russian Jewish descent. In 1952, bored by her studies at the nearby Sorbonne, she began to frequent Chez Moineau, a bar at 22 rue du Four. There she encountered a circle of artists, writers, vagabonds and petty criminals who were beginning to establish themselves as the Letterist International. With one of these, Patrick Straram, she toured Le Havre in August, 1952, in order to see the places upon which Jean-Paul Sartre's Nausea had been modelled.On 17 August, 1954, she married another member of the group, Guy Debord, and from then on she took a more active role in contributing to its publications (primarily its bulletin, Potlatch). Bernstein recalls that Debord had earlier tried to pick her up in a café in front of the Sorbonne, but that she had shaken her cigarette and said something disparaging. However, they first became friends, and then lovers: 'I did love him, and I am sorry he is not here with us now'.
[edit]From the Lettrist to the Situationist movement
Aside from simply getting drunk at Moineau's and other nearby bars—which was far from a minor part of their activity—the Letterist International were primarily concerned with transcending traditional artistic activities to produce 'situations' for themselves; to drifting aimlessly around urban environments in order to assess their psychogeography; and to diverting pre-existing texts and other materials to new ends. By 1957, however, most of the members of the Letterist International had either quit or been forcibly excluded, and the remnants opted to fuse with two other groups to form the Situationist International. Bernstein and Debord visited Cosio di Arroscia in July 1957: the Situationist International officially came into being there on July 28. The other two groups involved were the International Movement for an Imaginist Bauhaus and the London Psychogeographical Committee. The former was an off-shoot of the earlier CoBrA group of artists; the latter was not really a 'group' at all, but merely a name given to a single British artist, Ralph Rumney.
Thereafter, Bernstein contributed a number of articles to the situationists' journal, Internationale situationniste, either alone or in collaboration with the other members. She also had two novels published through Buchet/Chastel (the same publishing house as would later first publish Debord's major theoretical text, The Society of the Spectacle, in 1967). In All The King's Horses (Tous les chevaux du roi, 1960; republished Paris: Allia, 2004) and Night (La Nuit, 1961), Bernstein fictionalised her life with Debord in the 1950s, particularly acknowledging the liberality (including sexual freedom) that existed within their marriage. She also contributed an article on the situationists to the Times Literary Supplement (2 September, 1964). According to the French philosopher and occasional associate of the Situationist International, Henri Lefebvre, she additionally helped to support the situationists financially, by contributing horses' horoscopes to racing magazines.
During the first ten years of its existence, the situationists continued the work of the Letterist International, and extended them in new directions. Feeling that they had already adequately transcended art, the group began to take on much more of a socio-political character, as they sought to realise their philosophy. Their greatest moment came in the uprising of May 1968, which they might not have caused but which they certainly encouraged. Bernstein herself, however, had officially retired from the group the previous year. Her marriage to Debord had broken down as he became close to Alice Becker-Ho. The marriage was officially dissolved on 5 January 1972, and he proce

Reviews

[Greg · Rating 4 out of 5]

I thought I might write a review. Then I felt lazy, so I lay down instead. Then I started the review. I was bored before I even began. The review was more about the Situationist International than the book. The fucking infernal boredom of changing what I had written. I lay down again. If I did not have an aversion to drinking maybe I would have gotten drunk, then lay down again and I'd would have been bored but satisfied that I did not have anything else to do. Then I deleted the review, because it would have only been co-opted by the Spectacle anyway. Now I can live with myself without the bad faith that accompanies almost every single oppressive action in my shit stinking god forsaken life. Mooncheese I realized was living in bad faith in relation to the dominant paradigm of power and submitting willfully to the all embracing totality that feeds and keeps her alive. I threw her out of my revolutionary movement. She does not seem to care. I will write polemics against her in the future. Now I'm bored again and I will lay down to sleep. I disavow any claims to the creation of what is written above.

[Tosh · Rating 4 out of 5]

A wonderful and very interesting little novel by Guy Debord's first wife Michéle Bernstein. The rumor is that she wrote this 'fiction' to raise cash for the Situationists International - which may or may not be true, but nevertheless it's based on their marriage as well as on Françiuse Sagan's "Bonjour Tristesse and Cholderlos de Laciios's "Dangerous Liaisons with a nod to the Roger Vadim film version of that novel as well (which featured my fav Boris Vian in a cameo role).

It is pretty much a straight ahead narrative of a husband (Debord) and wife (Bernstein) who pick up other lovers, as well as explore 1950's Paris. TamTam Books, my press, was thinking of doing this book, but Semiotext(e) got their first. And they did a great job on the book. I am hoping that they will put out Bernstein's La nuit as well.

[Jeff Jackson · Rating 4 out of 5]

This must be one of the most charming anti-novels ever penned. Slyly subversive dismantling of tradition.

[Vendedor de rápida · Rating 4 out of 5]

La narración en forma de novela con aires libertinos de las correrías de Michèle Bernstein y su compañero Guy Debord es posiblemente un documento curioso, no sólo por la parte morbosa relacionada con los amoríos de los protagonistas con los diversos que van pasando por sus camas, sino por el retrato de ciertos ambientes intelectuales del París situacionista.

[Heronimo Gieronymus · Rating 5 out of 5]

Though a formidable writer and critic in her own right, Michèle Bernstein's principal claim to fame still remains the fact of her having been Guy Debord's first wife. Debord was, of course, the nominal figurehead of the Situationist movement, though the movement itself had only the most perfunctory organizational basis. Debord and Bernstein were married in 1954. The Situationist movement was not properly founded until 1957. Bernstein was a central force in the movement, famously learned and widely respected. Debord was a theoretician and filmmaker (the two practices an extension of one another). The influence of his writing on the New Left and avant-garde practices is impossible to overstate. Much of the Situationist orthodoxy would come to be seen as retrospectively foundational to the student movement at the heart of May '68 with its rampant factionalisms and insistence on the radicalization of everyday life. The two novels that Michèle Bernstein wrote at the beginning of the sixties, of which ALL THE KING'S HORSES was the first, have habitually been treated as little more than a curious footnote to those interested in Situationism and cultural artifacts apposite to its sundry activities. It probably has not done much for the reputation of her novels that Bernstein more or less disowned them, at one point telling Greil Marcus that they were essentially intended as a joke. The version of the story that Marcus disseminated was that Debord had prompted Bernstein to produce the pair of novels as a fundamentally commercial venture at a time when their finances were in poor shape. (Though the novel was eventually all but forgotten, it did originally sell handsomely.) The basic idea ended up being that the Situationist concept of détournement might be effectively deployed in order exploit a popular form while at the same time undermining it. (Détournement, the central technique of Debord's films, involves subverting "The Society of the Spectacle" by rearranging and vandalizing cultural forms and artifacts.) ALL THE KING'S HORSES would seem to have been a calculated attempt to make mischief by repurposing the basic template of Pierre Choderlos de Laclos's famous 18th century novel LES LIAISONS DANGEREUSES while at the same time cashing in on the success of Françoise Sagan's BONJOUR TRISTESSE (a novel Debord and Bernstein mocked in something like jaded abhorrence). The novel does not necessarily come off as a straight-up joke, per Bernstein's dismissal, but it is both ironic and deeply irreverent, the product of a robust intelligence having smart, anarchic fun with the whole enterprise. It is very much a kind of roman à clef casting versions of Debord and Bernstein themselves (already fantastically accomplished, still very young) as Gilles and Geneviéve, a young and blasé libertine couple playing subtle power games with their open marriage. The fact that Bernstein sees the commercial possibilities of her and Debord's amorality and rejection of received wisdom speaks to her intelligence and bemused cynicism. The way young people enact revolution at the site of the everyday can be packaged and sold to bourgeois readers in search of titillation. The tone of the book is, in accordance, playful and calculated. Though HORSES is anything but weighed-down by theory, Situationist concepts like détournement, dérive, and séparation are worked smoothly into the book, informing at a fundamental level how the characters live and how they subvert conventional practices. Dérive is foregrounded in the concern with walking as psychogeography; in her Afterword, Odile Passot speaks of the influence of Marcel Carné's 1942 film LES VISITEURS DU SOIR and how in Bernstein's novels Pars becomes a kind of Medieval forest. Gilles and Geneviéve may be fundamentally amoral, but just as they invent their city against the grain of history and ossified understanding, so too do they invent and manage their own systems of ethics and solidarity. They behave as though the rules are up to them, though ever in a state of provisional negotiation. People may get hurt, but that is the price of doing business. As a cinephile as well as a compulsive reader, I cannot help read ALL THE KING'S HORSES conscious of its being contemporaneous with the early, youthful films of the French New Wave. It shares with those films not only youth and milieu, but its combination of rejection and reimagination. It has things in common especially, and perhaps quite curiously, given his relative conservatism, with the films of Éric Rohmer. I think in some ways it could also be said to presage George Perec's epochal 1965 novel THINGS: A STORY OF THE SIXTIES, though Bernstein's is a far more subtle and perhaps magnanimous work. I think it is probably because of its subtlety, lack of bombast, and understated intricacy of critique that many people have failed to note the commanding brilliance of Bernstein's portrait. I love it and admire it. It avowedly deserves contemporary readers. Can't hurt if you have a special place in your heart for the heady foment of Paris in the late 50s.

[Tony Brewer · Rating 3 out of 5]

(Note: ^^^ Read Greg's review, perhaps instead of this book.)

Even if this weren’t the first novel of a founding member of the Situationist International, it would still be an interesting story, especially considering when it was written and published. I thought the introduction (by the translator) and afterword (by Odile Passot) were odd additions that didn’t really add anything beyond spine width. I would have preferred more commentary about the translation in the intro and less Freudian psychoanalysis in the afterword. And considering all the names dropped on the cover, one’s approach to the text itself can be skewed. “This is an important work” you might be tempted to think, and in some ways, sure, I suppose.

But this is a wisp of a tale about a couple of avant-garde enthusiasts in an open marriage in late ‘50s Paris. Really, that’s all it is. If you want to get into who the characters in the novel “really” are and what that may or may not tell you about the founding of the Situationist International, that’s a neat exercise. But the way the story is told and the way in which the couple manages their love life to me was fascinating regardless any historical/biographical baggage and speculation about the “actual events” that may or may not have inspired Michele. So many great lines and exchanges, and I think one does come away with a sense of how everyday life took shape in that time in that place for these people (their, ahem, situation).

It is noteworthy that this novel was supposedly written “purely” to make money and that it is considered a détournement of Les Liaisons dangeureuses. But again, I found it delicately crafted and intimate and fun to blast through. There’s no giant statement about art or life here, but rather lots of little ones about specific moments. You could back your way into “Horses” after schooling yourself with Debord’s more theoretical writings, and from that you might arrive at something Greater. But you absolutely don’t need all that to enjoy or “get” anything from this story.

I’m interested in “The Night,” Bernstein’s second novel, which is the same story as “Horses” told from a different perspective and in a different style.

I’m definitely on the hunt to find some Situationist poetry … in English, please. (Yeah I know, so provincial). And I’m also intrigued by Situationist music, which doesn’t seem to exist except perhaps postwar American bebop and some later surrealist rattlings. Who knows?

[Emily Laurent-Monaghan · Rating 3 out of 5]

a sexy-easy read

[Maria Bodin]

Jag läste den som une somnambule utan att orka kolla upp några glosor. Helt OK.

[Philippe Billé · Rating 2 out of 5]

Ce bref roman est doté d’une habile quatrième de couverture, où deux comptes rendus anonymes, chacun sur une colonne, donnent sur l’œuvre deux points de vue opposés, l’un élogieux, l’autre méprisant. Le titre est un vers de la vieille chanson anonyme «Aux marches du Palais». Les trois parties du récit portent en exergue des citations de Retz, Lénine, et Racine. C’est l’histoire, sur quelques semaines, de le vie dissolue d’un couple de libertins modernes, racontée par la femme, Geneviève. Madame bosse dans la pub, si je me souviens bien. Monsieur ne branle rien, à part pinter et se promener, la nuit de préférence, avec on ne sait quels subsides. Il carbure d’ailleurs un maximum, ne mettant «jamais d’eau» dans le Ricard. Ce couple semble uni par un lien invulnérable, mais s’emploie de part et d’autre à diverses coucheries, chacun des amants dans l’indifférence la plus totale à ce que ressentent les partenaires, qui sont tour à tour séduits puis jetés sans ménagement. «Ai-je une tête à avoir des principes?» lance la dame. Vous voyez le genre : des rebelles. Au contraire des Liaisons dangereuses, dans lesquelles Laclos, que l’on a accusé de décrire le mal avec complaisance, le dénonce en revanche sans ambiguïté, il n’y a ici aucune condamnation. On ne sait au juste si l’auteur approuve ces égarements, ou simplement se plaît à les dépeindre sans commentaire, comme cela arrive. Ce livre ne flatte donc pas la bête lisante dans le sens du poil, en ne proposant pas d’identification facile à un personnage positif, ou fascinant, en tout cas pour moi. Et je n’y ai pas non plus trouvé un quelconque de ces charmes, qui font que parfois un roman est supportable à lire. L’écriture est correcte mais fade, le récit ennuyeux, l’humour quasi absent, la profondeur philosophique nulle. Si j’ai cependant lu jusqu’au bout cet ouvrage, c’était poussé par une curiosité secondaire, après que monsieur Fréd R, qui m’en a offert la photocopie, m’eut expliqué que le protagoniste Gilles n’était autre que Guy Debord, qui fréquentait l’auteur à l’époque. La page de garde porte d’ailleurs une dédicace «pour Guy». Les amateurs disposent donc dans ce texte d’un portrait vraisemblable de cet écrivain plutôt secret, à la «belle voix grave», qui assure s’occuper «de la réification» en se promenant, qui «sait réinventer Paris», qui va en Hollande pour y faire «un scandale» et qui, quand sa dame lui demande s’il l’aime vraiment, lui répond «C’est à craindre», ce qui est assez chic. Et puis il y a les petites scènes pittoresques dont je me régale, avec mon goût tordu, comme celle où le personnage en question déclare ne pas aimer dormir sur la plage, tout en «époussetant soigneusement le sable qui collait à ses jambes», avant de soupirer «Il faudrait des arbres. Beaucoup d’arbres pour faire de l’ombre.» (III 1998)

[a · Rating 4 out of 5]

Why is there no threesome b/w Gilles, Carole and Geneviève? Central mystery of the novel.

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

The worst part of bohemian libertines are bohemian libertines.

I believe that Sartre's "Being and Nothingness" is a very long exercise in coming to terms of French acquiescence to the Nazis. The whole book reeks of guilt and shame and "the othering" of responsibility. How to reshape a free society with hands that are still stained with blood, blood that one gleefully spilled? Resistance? Camus answered that - one cannot beat death culture. The plague taints us all. Accepting that one embrace freedom by slamming their car into a tree. Lacking that courage, Sartre posits complexities of freedom within the oppression, how to live among the gore - turning skulls into soup bowls.

Harsh?

The children of the guilty, condemned, and concealed torturers struggled to fill the void of nothingness with their own situations which attempted to situated themselves in the horrorscape of so many open graves. Yet, overwhelmed by their own putrid stench, fail accept that the death they smell emmenated from their own gentials.

Harsher?

What is missing from the Situationist critique? What is the most distancing and reifying image to which the Spectacle always returns? The perfect advertisement, one executive is rumored to have said, is a naked women sitting spread legged on a chair with the words between her legs, DRINK COKE. Sex. But instead, we get poverty of student life, bomb shelters, and rumors of psychogeographical recoding of cafe avenues.

So what happens when for the sheer potential profitability of a horny, sex novel modelled on the polyamorous tradition of French fiction, emerges to parade itself fully nude to a chair and sprawl down, spread its legs and whisper gently, “Je jouis dans les pavés.”

The cool bored distance of taking yet another charming, young, and malleable young lover, this is no site for Spectacle, Marxism, or theory. Such things would ruin the bright shining lie that the French love to live – bad faith! How to live free in the shadow of such lingering inhumanity? This is a project still untouched.

[Benjamin Wagner]

Rätt rolig men lite tveksam till de blasé intellektuella som dricker så mycket osv, enligt berättelsen om situationisterna. För boken vill ju locka med en sorts stil, ett perspektiv som är distanserat i sin beskrivning av relationer och upplevelser. Ser nu att den är inspirerad av Bonjour tristesse av Françoise Sagan, och det var lite den boken jag påmindes om. Fast här är det ironiskt i massa lager. Men Michèle Bernstein skriver bra! Om det nu är hon eller de hon approprierat med sitt détournement som ska få cred för det, ehm. Man måste också säga att boken är skriven i en tid då det ändå var mer fräscht att ha den attityden de har, för på 60-talet hade inte också all oavantgardistisk kultur samma metakritiska och supersmarta vinkel. Jag tror att den vinkeln inte har samma betydelse idag. Den amerikanska tidskriften The Nation skriver om boken att "A lesser novel would surely offer us some competing vision of a more authentic life," och prisar alltså boken för att den inte nedlåter sig till att ha visioner. Men jag tror att det kan finnas en poäng i att faktiskt försöka skapa någonting, stå för någonting också. Att också arbeta med det som är kontaminerat. Debord skrev ju i alla fall i Skådespelssamhället om hur allting innehåller så många lager av overklighet, så i det så kan man se att romanen speglar situationisternas teorier, vilket gör den intressant om man håller på med den delen av kritisk teori. En lite kuriös detalj är att man i boken lätt kan tolka huvudpersonernas cynism helt enkelt som en effekt av deras sätt att leva, eftersom de festar så mycket och inte sover. Självklart skrattar de åt när de beskrivs som cyniska av deras naiva och oupplysta fd vänner som de dumpat.

[Sam · Rating 5 out of 5]

Imperfect novel, but it spoke to me for some reason. I found it quite funny and quite bleak at the same time. Only learned of it because I was reading Greil Marcus' "Lipstick Traces." I'm lucky my roommate had a copy. I have not read the novels that this novel is parodying/cribbing from, but all the same it is singular to me. I feel a resonance between it and the autofiction novels of the 2010's, though this was written well before "cool" was as codified and co-opted as it has become. The "cool" people here are also monster people, demons sent from hell to corrupt the normal folk, who are actually also monsters, just a different kind. Writing about this book takes away from it, I feel. Best to keep my mouth shut.

[McKenzie Wark · Rating 5 out of 5]

Big fan of both Michèle Bernstein's novels. I wrote about them a bit in The Beach Beneath the Street. How can a woman deal with her husband's affair without claiming his as her property? As in Dangerous Liasons, Cholderos de Laclos' classic, she does so with strategy. The whole thing is a détournement of what we might call, retrospectively, the chick lit of 1950s France. Books like Bonjour Tristesse. It pulls off the same cool style. Bonus: a few details of the life and times of Guy Debord, Asger Jorn and Bernstein herself, in between the fictional stuff.

[Aly · Rating 3 out of 5]

Me when I publish a book about my marriage once I’ve had time to reflect upon it all. Truly a very ~French~ situationist way of writing, but when I read it with the modern dating mind, it’s truly giving open-marriage situationship vibes but strictly with younger people. There were aspects that carried me through and made it a page turner, but let’s not make it something more than what it was, true life turned fiction. I know her claims are that it was all a joke so if you see me spilling about my life in fiction form in the future - it was part of the plot.

[Melchor · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lo cogí al azar en una librería y me sorprendió gratamente. Me recordó a Françoise Sagan y a Modiano por momentos.
Es un libro muy ameno, se lee muy rápido y es, también, un testimonio muy valioso de una época y una generación (además de una representación muy cercana y fiel de las ideas del Situacionismo), que, emparento un poco con la actual en algunos aspectos, especialmente en los tocantes a las relaciones sentimentales, a veces bastante difusas.

[Dylan Kiewel · Rating 4 out of 5]

did i just read a YA novel? or a very subtle detournement of one? the latter but it also breezed by real nice like i assume the former does. to detourn a b form is a sturdy bet especially if ur well read and tasteful and the milieu ur basing ur action on is 50s paris with the SI crowd. adds nice shades to my understanding of them, details of how they loved each other, how casual their little games of one-upsmanship were. read in not even a whole shift at work.

[meow]

in which the situationists are mean it-girls

[Christopher Waller · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is the most vapid French shit I've ever read.

[Hannah Jennings-Osodo · Rating 4 out of 5]

I kinda loved this book but feel like I shouldn’t.

[Justin · Rating 3 out of 5]

Situationist fiction with a lovely afterwards

[Eliana · Rating 4 out of 5]

Light, fun, dry, ironic, easy reading about how stupid polyamory is. What’s not to love!

[Josh Sherman · Rating 3 out of 5]

I know this is supposed to be a lampoon of a certain type of mid-century novel, but I enjoyed it earnestly. Sharp dialogue and descriptions, great pacing.

[Ingrida Vīlipa · Rating 3 out of 5]

Nezinot un neiedziļinoties konrekstā, grūti kaut ko saprast. Kā skatoties abstraktu gleznu, jsut gan no tās nāk zemapziņas asociācijas. Te ir cita spēle.

[Severin M · Rating 3 out of 5]

good for what it is, but what it is isn't great

[Jiho Burrows · Rating 4 out of 5]

and then nothing happened.

[Kit · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of my good friends gave this to me for christmas one year.

I didn’t know anything about it, or the author, or anarchy, or the situationists international, or anything.

I still don’t know a whole lot about any of that stuff, and i imagine my reading of it would hit me differently nowadays, nonetheless i did enjoy it a bit at the time

[Jared Estes · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a really interesting and intimate story by Michele Bernstein. Bernstein was one of a select few members of The Situationist International. The SI began in France and Bernstein was likely an early participant. Unfortunately, the women of SI were often overlooked as were all women in this time period. None the less, though not as revolutionary as the anarchist texts, Bernstein's story is captivating and a wonderful book in which I will continue to return to. Other members of the SI include Guy Debord who wrote the society of the spectacle and raoul vaneigem. Though, don't expect the type same material as found here. 5/5

[Zane · Rating 4 out of 5]

Michele Bernstein once married Guy Debord, which is enough to make a name, but, perhaps more importantly, she was an active member of the Letterist and Situationist Internationals. She raised money for the organization in various ways, for a time writing horse horoscopes for racing magazines. Supposedly, she wrote ‘All the King’s Horses’ for the same reason, to make money to fund the Situationist organization’s political activities. It was meant to be a work of commercial success, and, later, she disowned it.
Disowning a novel is a strange idea. It seems like it would be hard to gather enough motivation to write even a short novel, you didn’t believe in it yourself, but that’s what makes the work a little complicated. It’s a bit snarky. She’s making fun of the mundane aspects of the youth culture she was involved in; and though she makes allusions to dérive and the actions of producing situations, the events could hardly even be described as secondary, as they only make up a sentence here and there, passing through the main plot. The romance of the movement is stripped away, and in its place we get a diary about somewhat dysfunctional relationships (of the intimate kind), supposedly based on her open marriage with Debord.
There is a bit more than an average teen romance here: a subtly biting internal critique of the characters takes off rather humorously at points. The characters comparing themselves to a writer’s idea of art students let’s us take a step back and gives us an idea of the narrative voice Bernstein is playing with. It’s one of the tricks Julio Cortázar played in ‘Hopscotch’, or Fitzgerald in the ‘Great Gatsby’, showing the shallowness that existed in a subset of culture the author was passionately emerged in.
It’s not an easy trick to pull off. I heard a writer give a reading a few weeks ago who I think was attempting the subtlety of this style of self-critique in a short story, but in the end he was too far invested. Not just his narrator, but he himself came off as actually admiring the pathetic Williamsburg DJ, who was to serve as an example of a vapid, contemporary success.
When the publisher and translator’s preface to a work explains that it’s not that great and probably not even good, I would normally say to myself, ‘Well then, who has time?’ There are so many books people think are necessary to living a good life, even if they aren’t relative to the next reader at any given time or place. It seems more likely that we would take a chance on those. That’s why I feel strange recommending ‘All the King’s Horses.’ But for anyone who ever felt inspired by the history of the Situationist International, it is a nice artifact. And maybe it’s just that there is no sloganeering here, and, maybe, that’s what I really wanted, because realism doesn’t always help us make it through the day.

Seeing a friend write ‘Keep your head up’ with a paint pen on some playground equipment, however, might.

[Elevate Difference · Rating 4 out of 5]

Bernstein's novel is an intriguing roman à clef that takes a satirical look at avant-garde artistic and literary life in 1950’s Paris. The first-person narrator, Geneviève, is a thinly-disguised version of the author herself. In the "Translator's Introduction," Kelsey points out that this technique allows Bernstein to become "both star and spectator of her own story." Readers get to accompany Geneviève on her social rounds, to a gallery opening, dinner at an artist’s home, a crowded Left Bank party, numerous cafés about town, and to enjoy her clever, brittle observations: "The few ex-friends I met there were precisely the ones I would have preferred never to see again."

The plot is reminiscent of Choderlos de Laclos’s eighteenth-century novel, Les Liaisons Dangereuses, much as it was interpreted by Roger Vadim's movie adaptation featuring Jeanne Moreau: Geneviève is a modern Madame de Merteuil, with a charming, libertine husband, Gilles, in Valmont's role. This nonconformist wife amuses herself by aiding her husband’s romantic conquest of a vulnerable girl—a painter, Carole, just 20 years old. Shortly thereafter Geneviève herself takes a new lover, 19-year-old Bertrand, an aspiring poet. The interlocking pair of love triangles structures the rest of the story, with lovers’ quarrels, fits of jealousy, old friends and new seductions, drunken conversations, in-jokes and cultural allusions. Francophiles will appreciate references to dining at a restaurant in the rue Mouffetard, vacationing in Saint-Paul-de-Vence, reading Racine or Rimbaud. It is probably only in a French novel that one woman might compliment another by saying, "You have a pretty syntax," without being ironic.

Odile Passot's Afterword, "Portrait of Guy Debord as a Young Libertine," is almost more interesting than the novel itself, as it compares the Situationist writer/filmmaker with his depiction as Gilles, as well as discussing the influence that classic films have had on Bernstein’s writing. What Kelsey calls Bernstein’s "ambiguous quasi-feminism" rings a little hollow to my ear, yet her account does raise provocative questions about how male and female intellectuals relate to each other in contemporary society—which may not have changed much, in some ways, since the mid-twentieth century.

Review by Kittye Delle Robbins-Herring