The Holy Terrors

by Jean Cocteau, Rosamond Lehmann (translator)

A tragedy about the power of the imagination and the strange, claustrophobic world of childhood.

At home, Paul shares a private world with his sister Elisabeth, a world from which parents are tacitly excluded. Their room is where the Game is played, the Game being their own bizarre version of life. All that they do outside is effectively controlled by the rules of the Game -- but unfortunately the rules of the Game mean that everybody loses.

Genres: Fiction, France, Classics, French Literature, Literature, Novels, 20th Century

192 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1929

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

[Vit Babenco · Rating 5 out of 5]

Jean Cocteau writes in many colours as if he’s painting an impressionistic picture.
Lyceum in Paris… Schoolboys, when they are set free, go wild…

The doors of the little Lycée Condorcet, opposite number 72b rue d’Amsterdam, open, and a horde of schoolboys emerges to occupy the Cité and set up their headquarters. Thus it has reassumed a sort of medieval character – something in the nature of a Court of Love, a Wonder Fair, an Athletes’ Stadium, a Stamp Exchange; also a gangsters’ tribune cum place of public execution; also a breeding-ground for hazing schemes – hazing to be hatched out finally in class, after long incubation, before the incredulous eyes of the authorities. Terrors they are, these lads, and no mistake – the terrors of the Fifth.

It’s snowing… Boys are playing snowballs… Dargelos is the hero… He is an object of adoration for the other boy…

Dargelos was the Lycée’s star performer. He throve on popular support and equally on opposition. At the mere sight of those disheveled locks of his, those scarred and gory knees, that coat with its enthralling pockets, the pale boy lost his head.
The battle gives him courage. He will run; he will seek out Dargelos, fight shoulder to shoulder by his side, defend him, show him what mettle he is made of.

But everything happens differently… And a pale boy, Paul is being delivered home in a car with a trauma… He has a sister… They live in their own secluded world… They play the Game…

The word “Game” was by no means accurate, but it was the term which Paul had selected to denote that state of semi-consciousness in which children float immersed. Of this Game he was past master. Lord of space and time, dweller in the twilit fringes between light and darkness, fisher in the confluent pools of truth and fantasy…

Now Paul stays at home ill… His hateful father is dead… His mother lies paralyzed and soon dies… He and his sister are on their own… Their relationships are quite complicated… They become incredibly mischievous and histrionic… And time waits for no one…

They had no inkling, this orphaned penniless pair, that they were outlaws, living on borrowed time, beyond the battle, on fate’s capricious bounty.

He to whom life is a game is destined to lose.

[Warwick · Rating 4 out of 5]

When me and my sister were younger – like four and five, or five and six – we used to play these epic games in the back seat of our parents' car on long journeys. The car was a big old Citroën estate, like the vehicle from Ghostbusters, and the back seat folded down to form a huge play area (this was before anyone bothered about seat-belts in the back).

The games we played were incomprehensible to everyone but ourselves, and now we're older they've grown incomprehensible to us too. All I can remember are a few titles. One game was called ‘Baby in Australia’, which – bizarrely – was about a baby travelling around the United States having adventures. It was like Rugrats meets The Littlest Hobo. I'm not quite sure why we gave this such a confusing name. Another, more logically titled, game was called ‘Strongbaby’ (one word), and involved a baby with superhuman strength. I'm not certain now to what use an infant would really put Hulk-like strength, nor for that matter why we were both so obsessed with babies. But mothers and fathers reading this will readily appreciate that our own parents were happy to tolerate what appeared to be incipient psychological problems on the grounds that it kept us quiet for the length of a three-hour jaunt up the A1M.

I hadn't thought about this for years. Then I read Les Enfants terribles and it all came flooding back. If you've read the book this may sound alarming, but fortunately in our case it apparently never went further than a lot of weirdly regimented transport-based role-plays. For Paul and Élisabeth, the central characters of Cocteau's dark and dreamy novel, the shared world of childhood fantasy takes on a more all-consuming and sinister aspect.

Orphaned twins, they construct a haven of their own in their dead mother's apartment on the rue Montmartre (just round the corner from where I work), where their room is all low lighting, red textiles, pictures pinned up from newspapers, and a collection of hoarded ‘treasure’ brought back from the outside world. Here, in the middle of the night, the teenagers play what is only ever referred to as ‘the game’, a sort of never-ending psychological test of one-upmanship which governs their entire lives: the game is nothing less than a ‘semi-consciousness into which the children plunged’, which ‘dominated space and time; it initiated dreams, blended them with reality’.

Outsiders are brought into this private world, but they are always ultimately cat's-paws used by one sibling to get at the other. The self-imposed rituals are about domination, and there is a crackle of erotic charge everywhere: indeed at times this reads like the most literary treatment of D/S ever made. This is not to say that the book is about sex; it is much more oblique and remarkable than that. In one extraordinary scene, Élisabeth waits until Paul is just dropping off to sleep, and then, at three in the morning, she suddenly produces a bowl of crayfish from under her bed and starts eating them, ignoring Paul's anxious requests for her to share.

‘Gérard,’ [she says to Paul's schoolfriend who is with them,] ‘do you know of anything more depraved that some sixteen-year-old kid reduced to asking for a crayfish? He'd lick the rug, don't you know, he'd crawl on all fours. No! Don't give it to him, let him get up, let him come here! He's so vile, this gangling great oaf who refuses to move, dying for nice food but not able to make the effort. It's because I'm ashamed for him that I'm refusing to give him a crayfish….’

—Gérard, connaissez-vous une chose plus abjecte qu'un type de seize ans qui s'abaisse à demander une écrevisse? Il lécherait la carpette, vous savez, il marcherait à quatre pattes. Non ! ne la lui portez pas, qu'il se lève, qu'il vienne ! C'est trop infecte, à la fin, cette grande bringue qui refuse de bouger, qui crève de gourmandise et qui ne peut pas faire un effort. C'est parce que j'ai honte pour lui que je lui refuse une écrevisse….

An hour later, when Paul finally gives up and goes to sleep, Élisabeth wakes him and forces him to eat the crayfish, ‘breaking the carapace, pushing the flesh between his teeth’ as Paul struggles to chew while half-asleep: ‘grave, patient, hunched over, she resembled a madwoman force-feeding a dead child.’

It's an incredible scene the like of which I've never read anywhere else, and all described in this beautiful, verbally rich, precise Coctellian prose. The oppressive and erotic atmosphere is picked up on later by one of Élisabeth's friends, who is pining submissively after Paul: she ‘thrilled to be a victim because she felt the room to be full of an amorous electricity whose most brutal shocks were made inoffensive’. The novel's dénouement is going to prove her horribly wrong on this point.

The conclusion is dark and very French: the quasi-incestuous power-play cannot survive impact with adulthood, and implodes with considerable collateral damage. But how difficult for a writer to enter into this private world of childhood fantasy, and how perfectly Cocteau pulls it off. Some of his lines froze me with horrified delight: when the children find their mother dead in her room, the body is described as a ‘petrified scream’ – ‘ce Voltaire furieux qu'ils ne connaissent pas’. He combines the eye of a poet with a good novelist's willingness to examine the psychic areas usually left unexamined.

This year marks fifty years since Cocteau's death, and it's a good excuse to try him out if you haven't yet (as I hadn't until recently). Reading this is like having a beautiful dream that modulates into a beautiful nightmare. I kind of want to send a copy to my own sister, but I can't help feeling like that might be in bad taste.

[Luís · Rating 3 out of 5]

Paul and Elisabeth are brother and sister. Paul falls ill at the beginning of the novel following a snowball fight. The one who sent the projectile is Dargelos, for whom Paul feels boundless admiration without his noticing. Paul is assisted in his illness by his sister and one of his comrades, who also admires him. Gérard soon transfers his affection to Elisabeth. A three-way game soon takes place between Paul, Elisabeth, and Gérard; Agathe, an orphan brought back by Elisabeth, joins them. In this closed universe, touching and fraternal love have something unhealthy and turn into drama.
The characters' disillusions bring about the end of their innocence and adolescence. The room's charming closed door quickly loses color and soon appears morbidity—a novel of tenderness and violence in the stillness.

[Steven Godin · Rating 3 out of 5]

Apart from Paul Éluard who I truly admire, some of the other surrealists I just find are overrated - at least when it comes to moving from poetry to novels anyway.

Wanted to read this for ages, and described as a 'French classic' I was much looking forward to it coming off the back of reading Boris Vian's brilliant L'Écume des jours. While I wouldn't go as far as to say the experience was a damp squib - I did like the idea of the snowball fight linking the start and ending of the narrative - it was all rather dull in my eyes, with weak characterisation. Best thing about it for me was Cocteau's Illustrations.

The fact he was recovering from opium addiction at the time I'll take into account, so it just about squeezes a 3/5.

[°°°·.°·..·°¯°·._.· ʜᴇʟᴇɴ Ροζουλί Εωσφόρος ·._.·°¯°·.·° .·°°° ★·.·´¯`·.·★ Ⓥⓔⓡⓝⓤⓢ Ⓟⓞⓡⓣⓘⓣⓞⓡ Ⓐⓡⓒⓐⓝⓤⓢ Ταμετούρο Αμ · Rating 5 out of 5]

«Οι καθρέφτες είναι οι πόρτες
απ’όπου πηγαινοέρχεται ο θάνατος.
Άλλωστε δεν έχετε παρά να κοιτάζεστε όλη σας τη ζωή σ’έναν καθρέφτη
και θα δείτε το θάνατο
να δουλεύει
σαν τις μέλισσες μέσα σε μια γυάλινη κυψέλη.»

Είμαι ένα ψέμα που λέει πάντα την αλήθεια.
Ζαν Κοκτώ (1889-1963)

Αυτά τα τρομερά παιδιά μπουκώνονται με χάος, μ’ένα γλοιώδες συνονθύλευμα αισθήσεων.
Οι λιγοστές αναγνωστικές σελίδες σ’αυτό το σατιρικά τραγικό βιβλίο αποτελούν ένα αρχαιοελληνικό, σαιξπηρικό, γαλλικής λογοτεχνίας, δραματικό φάσμα γραπτού αριστουργήματος.
Τόσο απλό που γίνεται θεϊκό, τόσο αιχμηρό και πρωτοπόρο που φαντάζει σαν ρομαντικό χάδι ανάμεσα σε ερωτευμένες ανάσες. Ξεπερνάει πολλά όρια μα δεν αφήνει περιθώρια για χαρακτηρισμούς ακαταλληλότητας ή αχαλίνωτης ευθιξίας, αφού απο μόνο του υπονομεύει την ύπαρξη του, πατάει μόνο στα σκοτάδια της ζωής, βουτάει σε φουρτουνιασμένα πελάγη συναισθημάτων και όλα αυτά μαζί του δίνουν ένα άγριο άρωμα δυνατής και ανάρμοστης τέχνης.

Ένα μεγαλειώδες ψέμα μέσα απο τελετουργικές αλήθειες. Ένα γωνιακό σύμπλεγμα παιδικών και εφηβικών θρησκειών αποκρυφιστικών
απο αυτές που τα τελετουργικά τους
δεν κοινολογούνται ποτέ,
μαθαίνουμε μόνο πως απαιτούνται τεχνάσματα,
θύματα, συνοπτικές δίκες, δρόμοι, τρόμοι, βασανιστήρια και ανθρωποθυσίες.

Η παράφορη και ανεξέλεγκτη αγάπη ανάμεσα σε αδέλφια, σαν κακούργος βοριάς που φυσάει ξυράφια και ματώνει κατά διαστήματα το φως που απλώνει το σκοτάδι και όλες οι σκοτεινές γωνιές σε γειτονιές, ψυχές, και ειδυλλιακά θεάματα πεδίων μάχης,
κηδεύουν ήδη τους νεκρούς τους.

Τα τρομερά παιδιά υπάρχουν και αναπνέουν κοντά μας, δίπλα μας, μέσα μας. Είναι δικά μας γεννήματα όσο κι αν αυτό ακούγεται απειλητικό ή συκοφαντικό.
Δεν αναγνωρίζονται απο τεμπέλικα μάτια και σταματημένα στην αγελαία μάζα μυαλά, διότι σου χαρίζουν έναν ξεχωριστό τρόπο σκέψης, ενσυναίσθησης και ύπαρξης.
Τα τρομερά παιδιά πάνω στους
κοθόρνους των αρχαίων τραγωδών, αφήνουν πίσω τους την κόλαση των Ατρειδών,την προέλευση τους. Βασίζονται μόνο στη διαίσθηση τους και τα θεϊκά δικαστήρια τους είναι ακατανόητα.
Παλεύουν στη ζωή, ζουν μονίμως στο λυκόφως, σε άλλους τόπους, σε άλλες εποχές και όταν με ναρκωμένα απο αγάπη θανάτου μάτια κοιτάζουν τα τείχη που ανοίγονται απο απόκοσμες πληγές μιας βομβαρδισμένης πόλης, σαν σε θεατρικό έργο ανοιχτό στους θεατές, επιβραδύνουν τον οργασμό τους περιμένοντας τον νεκρικό σπασμό του αγαπημένου τους.
Κάνουν κουράγιο, ξέρουν να υποφέρουν,
να αδιαφορούν, να διαφέρουν και φθάνουν εκεί όπου οι σάρκες διαλύονται, εκεί που σμίγουν οι ψυχές με πάθος, εκεί που η αιμομιξία παύει να καραδοκεί.



Καλή ανάγνωση.
Πολλούς και σεμνούς ασπασμούς.

[Mariel · Rating 4 out of 5]

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.

[[P] · Rating 3 out of 5]

I thought the cliché that adults don’t understand children was untrue until I spent a year or two teaching. Having no young relatives, it was the first time I had been around them since my own childhood, and, more importantly, it was the first time I had frequent discussions about them with other adults. And I was astonished by how naïve the adults, in particular the parents, were, how totally, how greedily, they swallowed and regurgitated the idea that these kids were innocence personified, that they were incapable of, and uninterested in, anything dubious, even when presented with concrete, and sizeable, evidence to the contrary.

Being in that environment I would, naturally, regularly think back to my own youth, to the fights that were more bloody and savage than any I have seen or been involved in since, to the sexual experimentation, and the promiscuity, that would make a decadent Parisian author blush, to the ever revolving carousel of gangs, friends and enemies, to the appalling cruelty and the intense bonds, and the complex games that lasted for weeks, which often involved malevolently stalking each other through the woods. The only innocence was in the lack of understanding regarding what exactly all this stuff meant; you didn’t psychoanalyse, introspect, or define or make connections. You didn’t, for example, call what you felt love or happiness or hate, you simply felt; and you accepted, without question, that this was the world, never giving a thought to the existence of another world, the world of your parents.

One man who did know a thing or two about all this was French author, filmmaker, and artist, Jean Cocteau, whose most well-known work is the one under here. Les Enfants Terribles begins in Balzacian style, with Cocteau describing a peaceful scene, into which he then places a group of schoolboys, who ‘shatter the silence with the sound of tumult.’ Note the choice of words: ‘shatter,’ ‘tumult’; Cocteau wants to impress upon the reader that there is something brutal, a kind of violence, in the behaviour. By the end of the passage he has gone even further, describing the boys, and by extension all children, as ‘terrors’ with ‘animal instincts,’ a theme he pursues throughout the rest of his short novel. Indeed, when he introduces one of the main characters, Paul, he is hit with a snowball containing a stone and ends up badly hurt.

“At all costs the true world of childhood must prevail, must be restored; that world whose momentous, heroic, mysterious quality is fed on airy nothings, whose substance is so ill-fitted to withstand the brutal touch of adult inquisition.”

As the novel progresses the focus narrows until it is concerned with four people only, Paul and Elisabeth, who are brother and sister, and Agatha and Gerard; although the two siblings are, of course, the dominant force. But before focussing on them myself, I want to linger a little longer over the opening passage, because, once again, what the author describes here plays a central role in the rest of the text. Cocteau emphasises the schoolboys’ imaginative capacity as they transform the peaceful scene into an ‘Athlete’s stadium,’ or a ‘Wonder fair,’ or ‘Court of love’; the world, he suggests, isn’t for children something that is fixed, it is whatever they want it to be. But this world is insular, it, in a sense, excludes adults, with it having its own ‘cryptic language’, secret rites, etc. In a nice touch, Cocteau imagines a group of painters opening their windows and looking out at the boys and not recognising them as the subject of their sentimental paintings, titled things like Merry Wee Rascals and Play In A White World.

After the incident with the snowball Gerard takes an ailing Paul home, and in the back of the cab we get the first reference to the Game, when Gerard wonders if Paul is genuinely as hurt as he appears to be. His suspicion is that he may be ‘putting it on,’ which of course gives the impression that this would not be out of character. Both Paul and Elisabeth, it becomes clear, live a life somewhere between fantasy and reality. They adopt poses and attitudes, set each other [and Gerard] challenges, act out roles, etc.; their relationship is extremely close, but dominated by a kind of one-upmanship and a desire to exasperate or irritate the other. To return to what I wrote earlier regarding innocence, the siblings are innocent only in so much as they lack self-awareness. Numerous times Cocteau states that they are not conscious of the game-playing or the acting; he also mentions how Gerard felt something of ‘perversion or necrophilly in the delicious pleasures’ of travelling with Paul, but would never have thought about it, or understood it, in those terms. And so one sees the term ‘innocent’ as being defined by a kind of ignorance rather than goodness.


[From the film of the same name, which was also written by Jean Cocteau]

Despite giving the impression, with that brilliant opening, that the book was to be about the strange, savage nature of children in general, with, one assumed, the siblings being held up as an example, Cocteau rather ruins this interpretation [which, by the way, I preferred] by giving Paul and Elisabeth a background or history that justifies or explains their behaviour and approach and ideas. In short, he reveals that both their father and mother were neglectful and wild, and so one understands that the offspring of this couple have grown up without appropriate adult role models, and that they have been, to all intents and purposes, left to themselves to raise themselves; indeed, the author refers to an ‘inheritance of instability’. What this means for Les Entants Terribles is that it becomes particular; in other words, whatever it says about the two main characters can only be applied to these children in these circumstances or, at best, other children in similar circumstances. As hinted, I think it was a poor decision to take the novel in this direction, and, moreover, I’m not entirely certain it was Cocteau’s intention.

Another issue I had was with the author’s lack of subtlety or faith in his audience. At times it is as though he didn’t trust the reader to join the dots, to understand his work, and so repeatedly chimes in with unnecessary exposition, mostly in relation to the children’s lack of consciousness or self-awareness. In fact, there is a point in the text when he prefaces yet another reference to this with the phrase ‘it must be remembered’ as though there is any way even the dimmest reader could have forgotten when Les Enfants Terribles is less than one hundred pages long and he had already made the same point, in almost exactly the same words, about five or six times. Moreover, these infuriating authorial intrusions added to what was, for me, the book’s biggest flaw, which is that it feels more like a sketch, or draft, of a novel than one that is fully realised.

Before concluding, I want to comment on the style, because much is made of it in the reviews that I have so far encountered, with the word ‘beautiful’ being the most popular descriptor. Well, I didn’t find the writing beautiful. I would go with something like ‘overwrought,’ although I ought to point out that this isn’t necessarily a criticism. While it is not my favourite, I’m not at all opposed to a bit of ornate, bells-and-whistles prose from time to time. What I found more impressive was the symbolism. The book begins with snow, and there are numerous references to it throughout; the siblings are also said to be both extremely pale, and both wear white clothes [dressing gowns? I can’t remember] at various points. White is, of course, representative of innocence, but it is commonly associated with the spectral too. There are several deaths in the book, but I’m not too interested in those, although they are of course relevant and important. What did grab me is the idea that ghosts could be said to exist between two worlds, and this equally applies to Elisabeth and Paul, who, it must be remembered[!], live a life between fantasy and reality; they are of this world, and simultaneously not of it.

---

I didn’t know how to fit this into my review without ruining the structure, so I am placing it here.

I would like to point out that I do not understand the term ‘shocking’ as applied to this book; honestly, there is nothing shocking in it; in fact, the action is rather banal, for the most part. Furthermore, the claim that there is the suggestion of incest or homosexuality is, for me, a mighty stretch. I sometimes wonder if some people actually read what is before their eyes, or whether they simply allow their imaginations to run wild, because things are more fun that way. Yes, Elisabeth is once almost brought to tears by the ‘grace and beauty’ of Paul’s body, and yes they share a bath at one point, but thats it, theres nothing more salacious than that. In terms of homosexuality, Paul does have something of a crush on a boy called Dargelos, but Cocteau himself describes this as ‘chaste.’

[Scribble Orca · Rating 5 out of 5]

Midsummer Night's Dream machinations (with a little Anthony and Cleopatra mixed in for good measure) between any two of Cathy and Heathcliff, Laon and Cythna, (oh why not throw in a few of the Greek Pantheon as well - although they did more than just mess with each other's minds and really, who cared back then anyway) shot in very sexy black and white and accompanied by a stunning selection from Vivaldi and Bach. Not long on ambiguity, plenty of nods to Freudian concocteauns, marvelous narration from Jean himself. Adair's commentary is a wonderful recording of his voice.

[Steve]

Cette espèce de confort n'influençait guère les enfants, car ils avaient le leur et il n'était pas de ce monde.

(This kind of comfort hardly influenced the children, because they had their own and it wasn't of this world.)

Not of this world, truly.

Paul and Elisabeth, brother and sister, 14 and 16 years old at the beginning of the story, are an inseparable binary system with a satellite, Gérard, 14, caught fatefully in their gravitational well. Through a series of credible circumstances, Paul and Elisabeth find themselves alone with Gérard (and, towards the end, with Agathe), without close relatives, cloistered in their joint bedroom and falling deeper and deeper into the black hole of obsession, love and cruelty binding them together. From the apparently innocent beginning in a snowball fight to the horrific end some three years later, every step seems perfectly possible, indeed, seems increasingly necessary and fated. A doom had been spoken upon them.

Jean Cocteau's mature prose style is characterized by brevity and precision, by aphorism and energy. Also, usually, by an unmistakable touch of lyric poetry. In Les enfants terribles (1929) he reduces the dosage of poetry significantly in favor of brevity, precision and energy. Though sometimes adopting an ironic distance

Seule à la maison, Elisabeth prenait au coin des meubles ses attitudes hautaines.

(Alone in the house, Elisabeth would strike her haughty poses in the corners of the furniture.)

for some comic relief, Cocteau's prose enters more and more fully into the claustrophobic world of the ripening children, taking the reader with it. Some gestures are made by one or the other to escape this world, but they are made primarily to wound the other, to acquire an advantage, a power over the other, just as Agathe and Gérard are only pawns in their mutual game of love/hate. Whatever gestures are made every day, late every night they re-enter their private world, the only one that really matters. To emphasize the ineluctability of this private world, Cocteau inserts a deus ex machina, Michael, who disturbs that world, and whips him away to Isadora Duncan's death almost immediately. The private world is reinstated in a new location. The doom must be fulfilled.(*)

(*) In his Opium, Cocteau writes that Les enfants terribles was "born in 17 days" during one of his many rehabilitations from opium addiction, when opium's power "to give form to the formless" coincided with the return of his ability and desire to communicate with others (both of which disappeared when he was deep within the power of the opium).

Rating

http://leopard.booklikes.com/post/829...

[Jesús De la Jara · Rating 3 out of 5]

"Sabía que se deslizaba hacia su final por una vertiginosa pendiente, pero este final tardaba en llegar y sería preciso vivirlo"

Primera vez que conozco a Jean Cocteau, hombre multifacético de letras que escribió teatro, poesía, novela, ensayo y hasta fue artista e incursionó en el flamante cine. Escribió esta novela (publicada en 1929) según se cuenta en 17 días durante su estancia en un hospital, mientras se recuperaba de los efectos del opio que ingirió compulsivamente luego de tener la noticia de la muerte de Radiguete. Tiene muchísimo de sus recuerdos infantiles, gran tema de los autores de inicios del siglo XX. La introducción de esta genial edición de Cátedra te explica los posibles orígenes de los personajes, sus recuerdos de colegio así como el conocimiento que tuvo de una pareja de hermanos que utilizó en su obra.
La historia trata sobre la vida fundamentalmente de dos hermanos Paul y Elisabeth. Empieza cuando en el colegio de la ciudad de Monthiers (Instituto Condorcet) Paul sufre una paliza de parte del alumno Dargelos. Éste se nos presenta como un semidiós muy atractivo y sobre todo con un "orgullo moral" como mencionan en el libro que cautiva a casi todos. Hay un grado de atracción que siente Paul por él. Luego, su amigo Gérard, que a su vez tiene un afecto por Paul se encarga de llevarlo a casa donde se relaciona con la hermana de Paul: Elisabeth.
Y así empieza una serie de situaciones que podríamos llamar infantiles entre este trío de personajes a los cuales se les sumará luego Michael y Agathe. El título de "Niños terribles" me indujo pensar en un grupo de colegiales tal vez vivarachos y libertinos. Pero más que todo es una relación de hermandad y amistad. Si se le puede llamar así.
Los jóvenes que bordean entre 15 y 17 años comparten muchas cosas en común: sobre todo su gran inmadurez, su despreocupación por el mundo real. Y las circunstancias son las que no van a permitir de alguna manera que puedan desarrollarse o adquirir responsabilidades. Durante la lectura parecía como que están encerrados en una obra de teatro, hay nula interferencia casi del aspecto social en sus vidas, pero ése es el efecto que el autor quiso transmitir y lo hace muy bien. Viajamos a través de sus relaciones inmaduras, insultos, juegos, rencillas y manipulaciones. Toman decisiones de adultos pero siempre desde un punto de vista infantil.
La novela es corta y me pareció relativamente sencilla, no fue tanto de mi agrado por el argumento inicial y porque el estilo no me pareció extraordinario. Sin embargo hay mucho que destacar si lo analizamos por partes o por decir de alguna manera más allá de la trama que es entretenida. Hay bastante simbolismo en toda la obra, si uno se fija en algunos elementos aparecen en casi toda la obra, uno de ellos la bola blanca y la bola negra. La presencia de Dorgelos es casi "nula" en la historia, sin embargo, es un elemento que está presente en los afectos o sentimientos de los personajes principales. Hay algo de surrealismo en las descripciones por momentos pero que me parecieron de mi gusto, no tergiversan demasiado la historia ni se mete en caminos intrincados, ni tampoco hay demasiada artificialidad. Pocas frases me encantaron pero los episodios descritos logran el efecto de estar en la historia y comprender a los personajes o por lo menos las sensaciones que experimentan, lo que ven, lo que sienten, o lo que maquinan. La obra es muy armoniosa, como digo, son detalles que se pueden escapar porque uno casi siempre valora el argumento y las frases. Pero existen situaciones similares, complementos, parejas y sub parejas, empieza casi como termina esta pequeña obra. Hay también algunos temas tabúes como una relación aparentemente incestuosa entre los dos hermanos que nunca se llega a decir con todas las letras y la interpretación puede ser de cada uno.
El final a mí me pareció muy bueno, a pesar que se dice que en vida Cocteau recibió malas críticas por esa parte en específico. En realidad parece una historia surrealista en medio de la realidad, y la realidad por momentos parece no afectar a los personajes que parecen pasearse dentro de sus temores, perversiones y obsesiones eternamente.

"El orgulloso Dargelos que hería los corazones con un insoluble amor se metamorfoseaba en una muchacha tímida que Paul dominaría"

[Dannii Elle · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Room provides the nexus for the Game, which excludes the outside world and demands the utmost devotion to its twisted rules. Its players, siblings Paul and Elisabeth, use it as both saviour from reality and to enact vengeance through their play. Later characters are added into the gameplay, but not as equal participants, as they first believe, and instead as props to enhance both the daredevilry that the Game increasingly demands and to propel them all to a chilling yet inescapable end.

The Game appeared, at first sight, to be a simple past-time that young children and siblings often enact. It provides the construction of some unknown universe and forbids outsiders from entering it or even to decipher the coded rules and instructions that governs the gameplay.

Here, however, the Game becomes increasingly erotically and emotionally charged, although nothing explicit ever actually occurs,. Tensions simmer and passion and hatred are so equally bonded inside of it that it becomes impossible to differentiate the two. This heated atmosphere often gives way to explosions of temper and, following this, a peaceful segway into another scene that only allows for the endless cycle to begin again.

'Play' seems a far too innocuous a word to use when describing the dream-like quality that ensued whenever the Game was sought out. It was all-absorbing, with its close-confines and twisted design ensuring it held sway over its player and I, as the voyeuristic reader, alike. Real-life continued beyond the confines of their self-constructed Room and yet was kept at bay by the force-field that appeared to emanate from the Game.

The gravitational pull of the Game, and Cocteau's exquisite word-play surrounding it, has kept this book in my thoughts long after finishing it. The taboo surrounding the forbidden and the foreboding drew me to this as surely as its key players were forever fated to exist solely inside of the Game of their own construction.

[Cody · Rating 5 out of 5]

Trump Reviews The Classics

How about this Jean Cocteau, am I right? What a talent. Fantastic with the movies, the books...the drawing and coloring. Incredible. What an American! I said to Jean the other day at Mar Lago, I said, "Jean, you're a real mensch, even if you have a broad's name!" We both got a kick out of that, me saying the Jew word. Can you imagine? Anyone seen my numbers with the Jews? Amazing. 99.73% of the Jewish voting people chose Trump. The Jews love me.

You all know Ivanka? What am I saying—of course you do, everybody does. Everybody loves my Ivanka. We both love this book, and I read it each night to her as a bedtime story. It's about the kind of moral family fiber that keeps America strong. Just a simple story about two relatives that love each other very very much. That's key, guys: loving your family and expressing it. And no one has ever had to wonder about my loving Ivanka. She's beautiful, stunning! A knock out! Legs for days. Legs like American highways—which, I might add, are in the best condition they have been in decades under my administration. Great ass, too. Like a peach.

Believe me.

[Fede · Rating 2 out of 5]

Ugh.

I can't help but wonder whether this book, had it been written by anybody else, would be so praised in spite of its shortcomings. No doubt Cocteau's name made - and still makes - the difference, but I'm too keen on overthrowing such golden pedestals to accept this as a value per se.
In short, here's another holy cow I'll be just honoured to turn into a lot of juicy meat. Or bloody pulp. That would be even better.

This is a book that wants to be many things and doesn't succeed in being anything at all.
Scandalous? Not in France, not in the 20s.
Outrageous? Not after the Dadaists had started to exhibit urinals in art museums.
Disquieting? Not after WW1 had just ravaged 80% of Europe.
Intellectually provoking? Hard to tell, since Cocteau was part of an artistic and intellectual wave in which so many greater talents were at work.

The protagonists are young Paul (14) and Élisabeth (16).
After Paul's illness and their mother's death, the siblings find themselves living alone in their Parisian flat, more precisely in the bedroom they share - a filthy mess in which they spend the whole day sleeping and eating junk food, then staying awake all night doing... things. Strange games in which Cocteau attempts to suggest latent eroticism, latent violence, latent desire.
Latent indeed. Too latent to be even remotely interesting, intriguing, let alone arousing.
Then two friends of them, a boy and a girl about the same age, get involved with them and enter the sancta sanctorum of the room, although the part they will play in this clumsy ménage à quatre is not the one they have in mind... especially because they are so poorly developed as characters that they don't actually have a mind. There's also a fifth boy actually, Élisabeth's American admirer, whose fictional life is mercifully short: in fact he comes out of the blue, marries the girl (yep) and dies in a few paragraphs, without having entered the room and joined 'the game', whatever it is (the author gives no further details).
All we know is that the kids' bedroom becomes kind of an asphyxiating microcosm in which four asocial, not-so-brilliant teenagers wallow in their tantrums for three years.
Yes, folks... three years.
Quite unlikely, uh?
Naaaah, don't worry! Time is not exactly a hurdle when the passing of three years is described in one single line.
However. Where was I? Oh yes, the room.

"They furnished this tempting, devouring room with dreams, believing they hated it."

I would have loved to know what dreams, though; what nightmares; what desires.
I mean, am I supposed to identify with these guys? Am I supposed to see in 'the room' my own mental hideout or something? Am I supposed to... what the hell am I supposed to do as a reader if the author himself doesn't seem to know what the point of his novel is???

As for the protagonists, well, they bored me to death. All of them. They bored me to death precisely because they kept doing their best to turn me on and get me interested in their shallow existence, like annoying children asking for attention... and I hate children asking for attention.
In this case, I hated them with all my heart. Paul is a wannabe pervert with kind of a castration complex for his sister, whereas Élisabeth is a neurotic weirdo with what is supposed to be a sadistic tendency - in Cocteau's intentions, that is. As for the couple's friends, they're little more than a literary device to make the story even more titillating - once again, only in Cocteau's intentions.
The problem is that Cocteau is neither able to suggest nor to describe. The kids' psychological drives are so inadequately analysed that I soon stopped to care about them, say on page 10; their actions are a series of random, ridiculous, childish parodies of those kinky games Bataille describes in "Histoire de l'œil" (which I disliked even more, by the way) or the subtle ferocity of Laclos' depraved aristocracy.
Predictably enough, the ending is a love - jealousy - death cliché in which the characters finally reach the highest possible level of grotesqueness.
And it's the apotheosis of melodrama.

Now, if you want to write erotica, you must write about sex, right?
If you want to write about kink, you're supposed to plunge your lovely hands in the dirt, aren't you?
If you want to write about psychosis, you must tell about psychotics, not morons, am I wrong?
Well, I wonder what it was that Cocteau wanted to write about. Because I just didn't get it.

All in all, a small cog in the great machine of French literature - one I could have done without, if you ask me.

It's 2.50am here. And I must be really wasted to use my chill-out, post-party / pre-breakfast time to review the most boring thing I've come across in months.

[MJ Nicholls · Rating 4 out of 5]

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?

[Matthew Ted · Rating 2 out of 5]

153rd book of 2020.

Well, not what I was expecting. I wonder if the translation is to blame for the utterly bizarre writing style—the whole novel was oddly written, almost clunky. I’d probably put money on the fact this inspired McEwan’s The Cement Garden. And I’ll put more money on the fact that a certain somebody in the novel who dies in the most unusual way (their scarf wrapping around the wheel of their automobile and strangling them instantly) is inspired by Isadora Duncan’s 1927 death (two years prior to the publication of this in 1929), of the same fashion.

Simply: this book is about a brother and sister who play a game (“The Game”) which all siblings play… Annoy one another to the point of distress and argument. The opening is apparently “famous” (famous, of course, being a very subjective word)—Paul, the brother, is injured by a snowball with a stone in it; for some reason, he is ill for most of the book after that. Parisian snowball fights are very dangerous, clearly. The sister, Elizabeth, looks after him, mostly. The book then progresses, and so do the years, and not much really happens: it is a short book, only 140 odd pages. Cocteau wrote it in 17 days, in a clinic, suffering from his opium addiction. Opium features in the novel, unsurprisingly.

I often use the term “Nothing Novel”, and it applies again here. Sometimes they entertain for a short amount of time, only to be almost instantly forgotten in the pool of other stories we inhale, or, like in this case, it wasn’t particularly entertaining but we read it anyway and then forget it. The ending is pretty dramatic but still failed to stir anything in me. I blame either the translator or the opium. I’m not sure which.

[Nate D · Rating 4 out of 5]

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 totally compelling. I guess the mystery is not that disaster impends but in watching how it will impend. Even so, as we get closer the ending starts to come into focus and the total gripping intensity of the first half wanes a little. Even the impressionistic, disjointed beauty of the opening passages fades a little into more mundane narrative sequences. But the language is so good when its good. From the opening blizzard:

Here and there, some fragmentary image stood out in stereoscopic detail between one blindness and the next; a gaping mouth in a red face; a hand pointing -- at whom? in what direction? ... It is at him, none other, that the hand is pointing; he staggers; his pale lips open to frame a shout. He has discerned a figure, one of the god's acolytes, standing on some front door steps. It is he, this acolyte, who compasses his doom.

(more quotes here)

I also have to wonder if this was the inspiration for Bertalucci's The Dreamers. It seems highly likely. The story is different, but the central relationship contains many of the same elements of terminal fascination and escape into some kind of an unreal, removed existence.

[S̶e̶a̶n̶ · Rating 5 out of 5]

With concise prose that borders on perfection, Cocteau describes a sibling bond of mystical proportions thriving on childhood's intricate magic, and the blunt club of encroaching adulthood destined to destroy it.

[Nicole~ · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars
A Bizarre Story-

In 'Les Enfants Terribles', Cocteau gives the reader a melodramatic view of adolescence, void of innocence and filled with darkness; a peculiar relationship between brother and sister of excessive indulgence, petulance, childish pettiness and selfishness. Paul and Elisabeth contrive and control their fantasy games in the 'Room' that cocoons them from the world, a place where they feel most alive - a comfort zone. Their individual existences are simultaneously symbiotic and parasitic - a constant 'give and take' revolves around them, matched in strength by the innate need of one to feed off the other.

Their games are initially mischievous, innocuous, anywhere from benign tricks and silly fights to squabbling and name-calling, making faces at strangers and petty thievery, one-upping the other with ever-increasing risk. The ridiculous behaviors don't cease into their adulthood but rather become more frenzied, more sadomasochistic, more psychotic.

The story's strange interplays have the resemblance of drug-induced hallucinations, which might well have been intentional on the author's part. For example, one might recognize an allegorical suggestion at the beginning of the story, in the snow scene where Dargelos, whom Paul admires, injures him with a snowball blow to the chest, leaving him permanently and morbidly ill. His days are spent in bed, wasting away. He would suffer trance-like states and sleepwalk at night. The end is also tragic partly due to a 'poisonous substance', again, provided by Dargelos.

Paul's voice was loud, aggressive. "Glorious stuff, poison! I was always dying to get hold of some when I was at school." ( It would have been more accurate to say that Dargelos was obsessed by poisons and that he, Paul, had copied Dargelos.)

Paul and Elisabeth's unity and possessiveness goes undeniably beyond the boundaries of sibling love or rivalry. When one tries to leave the 'cocoon', the other must invariably follow. For instance, when Elisabeth marries her wealthy fiancé and moves into his mansion, she must make a room for Paul, who would fashion it to duplicate the old 'Room'. Later on, as Agatha confesses her love of Paul, Elisabeth vengefully retaliates like a jealous lover.

There is an unmistakably apparent 'forbidden' sexual element to the characters' relationships, starting with the Paul -Dargelos connection in the opening scene. "He was looking for Dargelos, whom he loved. It was the worse for him because he was condemned to love without forewarning of love's nature. His sickness was unremitting and incurable-a state of desire, chaste, innocent of aim or name."

With Paul and Elisabeth, an incestuous undertone is strongly present.
"...Elisabeth and Paul took possession of the bedroom, leaving the bathroom to Gérard. By nightfall, the situation had deteriorated; Elisabeth wanted a bath and so did Paul. They sulked, raged, turned on one another, flung doors open, slammed them again at random, and ended finally at opposite ends of the same boiling bath, with Paul in fits of laughter."

Freud is so present in this novel. The book comes to a suspenseful conclusion, still leaving the reader a little perplexed about its purpose.

Cocteau's strange tale may portray some very dark and self-serving human behaviors, some of which, for an adolescent, might be misdemeanors easily overlooked; the adult, however, might be sent to Purgatory, a more permanent tragic end.

In an alternate view, 'Les Enfants Terribles' may possibly be the author's psychological comparison of destructive behaviors from childhood to adulthood - that an adult is the malignant version of its younger self; the behaviors don't really change over time, just that their outcomes become lethal.

[Iris ☾ (iriis.dreamer) · Rating 2 out of 5]

2,5/5

Jean Cocteau, entre muchas otras cosas fue un escritor y poeta francés que en 1929 escribió uno de sus libros más reconocidos: “Los niños terribles”, cuya adaptación al cine triunfó en 1950. Siendo francesa y queriendo expandir más mi cultura literaria en esta literatura, tenía claro que debía leer este escrito. Sin embargo, lo que hallé no fue lo que esperaba.

La historia comienza cuando Paul, nuestro joven protagonista, recibe un golpe de una piedra mientras transcurre una batalla de bolas de nieve con un grupo de amigos. Este enfermará, su hermana será quien le cuidará y protegerá aislándose en su propia y extraña realidad. La violencia, la rebeldía y el amor serán los temas principales en esta obra protagonizada por unos niños que se niegan a ser adultos.

Quiero comenzar manifestando que me he encontrado con una lectura atípica, que en ocasiones resulta compleja a la par que confusa y precipitada. Quizá, es que el surrealismo no es un estilo con el que conecte pero el resultado es que al finalizarla, solo me ha embargado un sentimiento: la indiferencia. Sé, a ciencia cierta, que sus fervientes admiradores, justamente lo que veneran de este libro, es cómo está escrito pero siento no poder expresar lo mismo.

Indagando sobre el autor y su obra tras finalizar la lectura, supe que Cocteau escribió este relato en dieciséis días durante su estancia en un centro de desintoxicación por su adicción al opio. Cuentan que se dejó llevar por un impulso y fue relatando todo lo que se le ocurría sin meditarlo. Gracias a esta información, entiendo ciertos aspectos de su narración, pero no por ello he podido disfrutarla más.

En conclusión, creo firmemente en que la idea original de la trama es buena y el único problema que hallo es cómo está narrada. El comienzo es tan confuso que creó una sombra imborrable en esa recta final que es mucho más lineal y que proyecta mejor el mensaje de la obra. Debo reconocer el mérito de este escritor pues la crítica lo aprueba pero definitivamente no he conectado con su estilo narrativo.

[Ana · Rating 4 out of 5]

Les Enfants Terribles is an extremely poetic but utterly unholy novel about the fascination for the forbidden. An orphaned brother and sister escape into a private world of their own making and become unable to function outside of it. Largely unsupervised, their vibe is at first playful, but then grows into something darker as they engage into increasingly intense, violent and sexually charged mindfucks.

Additional characters are brought into their Game – especially a school friend, Gérard, who develops an obsession with the siblings’ D/s dynamic and its latent eroticism and aggression. But, Gérard is not an equal player. He is mostly a keen spectator to the ritualized power play between sadistic Elizabeth and her bratty brother, Paul.

The relationship between the ungodly duo and Gerard brings to mind the impervious ménage à trois from Bertolucci’s The Dreamers. Like Isabelle and Theo from the film, Elizabeth and Paul are quite the symbiotic pair. There are incestuous undertones implicit in everything they do. In Cocteau’s book, the sibling’s lair is their shared bedroom where the Game is being played. This Game is at its core a ritualized psychological torture: Elizabeth teases Paul with intensifying violence, and Paul is making great efforts to remain unmoved. The winner of each game session is the one who succeeds in driving the other one to a temper tantrum. These two have a kink for provoking and irritating the hell out of each other. Elizabeth’s gets her kicks by cruelly taunting Paul, Paul gets his by remaining stubbornly impassive as a way of annoying his sister.

As a reader, you get to experience the voyeuristic pleasure of watching a toxic relationship implode. The tension builds up as les enfants terribles engage in escalating cycles of mental domination and submission that traps them into the claustrophobic world of The Game and puts them into an incurable state of transgressive desire that ends like a Greek tragedy, but with French stylishness.

[James Henderson · Rating 3 out of 5]

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 obsessed with Dargelos herself too.
The brother and sister start this activity that they call “the game”, in which they try to hurt each other psychically. It’s baffling to other people to watch, and their friends and lovers are intermittently excluded and brought into this game. A girl comes into the story called Agatha, whom Paul falls in love with. Elisabeth is jealous of her, and tries to put an end to that.
It’s a psychically and emotionally sadomasochistic novel. With s poetic and minimalist style Jean Cocteau writes a book that is an artistic achievement. Reading the book is a little like looking at an impressionist work of art or an opus by Debussy. It is evocative and poetic and beautiful and strange. Strange in the obsessions it explores with beauty or the idea of beauty at the center of it all. That it exposes taboos and explores them is intriguing in an artistic sense.
This book is a great paean to youth. It’s a book that loves beautiful, young people, and it can reawaken that love of beauty in the reader of any age as well.

[Kyle · Rating 2 out of 5]

Actual rating: 2.5

Not impressed.
The story of a severely tempestuous and co-dependent brother and sister, Elisabeth & Paul, orphaned following their mother’s death, slowly devolves into chaotic isolation, one in which drags down with them two others, Gerard & Agatha. As the four swirl around each other in the atmosphere of The Room— a space wherein they dwell; more-or-less, an unhinged realm where they enact The Game: a dysfunctional and totally mad, well, Game. I felt nothing for any of the characters, for they all were pitiful and varying levels of insane in their own ways... but Elisabeth, I must say, is the antichrist. She’s utterly psychopathic!
While I found the writing at times lyrical and sumptuous, it was too often prosaic and overworked for me. I felt detached most of the readthrough. I did have an appreciation for the fever dream quality of the story as a whole, though. It was, in certain moments, like a beautifully deranged hallucination, but one in which left me cold and blank.

[Lavinia · Rating 4 out of 5]

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.

[knig · Rating 4 out of 5]

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.

[Vanessa · Rating 2 out of 5]

2.5 stars.

I don't know. I have mixed feelings about this book I guess. Having the knowledge that the book was the basis for another book that was adapted into the movie The Dreamers (which I did enjoy) meant that I viewed the characters very much like the actors in these roles, and sometimes I found my unnecessary expectations affecting the way I perceived the characters and how the plot would develop.

For the most part, there isn't much of a plot to this book. Two siblings, Elisabeth and Paul, are constantly at each other's necks but are at the same time inseperable, playing the Game that very often takes other people's feelings into account. I found that the Game wasn't as big a theme as I thought it would be, with more emphasis on the Room that was their safe haven and bewitching to outsiders.

The siblings, particularly Elisabeth, are for the most part terrible human beings, and there are often strong allusions to incest which doesn't bother me but might bother other people. Overall I wasn't super impressed by this book, but it was a quick (if not so light) read, and I enjoyed the illustrations by Jean Cocteau dotted throughout.

[Zorua64 · Rating 4 out of 5]

j'ai longtemps eu envie de lire Les enfants terribles, je l'ai trouvé par hasard, abandonné dans une boite en carton devant ma porte. J'avais un a priori positif mais je dois avouer que, même si j'étais contente de pouvoir enfin le lire, j'étais un petit peu mitigée (j'avais peur d'avoir eu trop d'attentes).

La première partie est belle, la deuxième est vraiment sublime. Je trouve qu'il y a quelque chose de très juste et ceux qui ont voulu y voir une sorte d'histoire d'amour incestueuse ne connaissent rien à la fraternité. Cocteau a vraiment réussi à retranscrire cette sorte de jalousie spécifique aux relations fusionnelles entre frère et sœur. L'histoire d'amour entre Paul et Agathe est très belle mais c'est vraiment le lien entre Paul et Elisabeth qui intéresse Cocteau, il y a quelque chose d'irréductible et d'incommunicable qui ne peut pas se partager aux autres membres du jeu.

Cocteau le dit assez explicitement à plusieurs reprises, il parle d'une sorte de hiérarchie, d'extériorité des autres membres du groupe : le jeu n'existe que par Paul et Elisabeth. Il y a quelque chose de très fort et de très sombre qui plane au dessus de la seconde partie et le suicide du duo n'est pas une surprise, il est plus qu'attendu.

J'aime vraiment le fait que le jeu reste assez incompréhensible, on a des éléments, on saisit l'importance du trésor, on comprend vaguement ce que signifie "partir" du jeu, mais la structure reste très floue. En un sens on en sait autant que Gérard et Agathe, nous ne pouvons pas nous mettre entre Paul et Elisabeth, le jeu nous est à la fois montré et inaccessible. On est dans une sorte d'extériorité forcée, on ne cherche pas à s'identifier naïvement aux personnages, Cocteau montre un absolu et maintient volontairement une force d'opacité et c'est vraiment sublime...

[Marc · Rating 5 out of 5]

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.

[Lina · Rating 2 out of 5]

Ce livre est un subtil plaidoyer à la Roméo et Juliette pour l'inceste. Voilà. Je n'ai aucune autre interprétation.

[kate]

it’s giving the dreamers (have never seen) EDIT post watching the dreamers: “The Dreamers is a 2003 romantic drama film directed by Bernardo Bertolucci. The screenplay is by Gilbert Adair, based on his 1988 novel The Holy Innocents […] a novel by Gilbert Adair of three young cinephiles: two French siblings and an American stranger who enters their world. Its themes were inspired[1] by Jean Cocteau's 1929 novel Les Enfants Terribles (The Holy Terrors) and by the 1950 film of the same name directed by Jean-Pierre Melville” AHA it’s sickening being the smartest person in the world

[Andrey · Rating 5 out of 5]

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.