Les Enfants Terribles
Condition: SECONDHAND
This is a secondhand book. The jacket image is a photograph of the exact copy we have in stock. This image shows the condition of this book. Further condition remarks are below.
Condition remarks:
Book: Fair
Jacket: No dust jacket
Pages: Yellowed
Condition remarks: Condition as shown in image
Translated by Rosamond Lehmann, Jean Cocteau's Les Enfants Terribles draws the reader into the suffocating, snow-globe world of Paul and Elisabeth, a brother and sister whose fierce co-dependence seals them off from the adult world in a private universe governed by their own dangerous rules — a realm they call the Game. Set in Paris and unfolding with the fevered momentum of a fever dream, this 1929 masterwork of French literature charts the siblings' descent from adolescent fantasy into obsession, jealousy, and tragic self-destruction, as the outside world — in the form of new lovers and new loyalties — begins to breach their fragile sanctuary. Cocteau writes with the restless, image-saturated intensity of the Surrealist milieu he inhabited, and the novel stands as one of the most psychologically audacious works of the twentieth-century French canon. Lehmann's elegant translation preserves the original's hypnotic, almost hallucinatory prose style, capturing the claustrophobic intimacy that makes the siblings' bond as seductive to the reader as it is fatal to those within it. A searing portrait of arrested adolescence and the destructive power of myth-making, Les Enfants Terribles asks whether those who refuse to grow up are romantics — or simply dangerous.
Author: Jean Cocteau
Format: Paperback
Genre: Classic fiction
Condition remarks:
Book: Fair
Jacket: No dust jacket
Pages: Yellowed
Condition remarks: Condition as shown in image
Translated by Rosamond Lehmann, Jean Cocteau's Les Enfants Terribles draws the reader into the suffocating, snow-globe world of Paul and Elisabeth, a brother and sister whose fierce co-dependence seals them off from the adult world in a private universe governed by their own dangerous rules — a realm they call the Game. Set in Paris and unfolding with the fevered momentum of a fever dream, this 1929 masterwork of French literature charts the siblings' descent from adolescent fantasy into obsession, jealousy, and tragic self-destruction, as the outside world — in the form of new lovers and new loyalties — begins to breach their fragile sanctuary. Cocteau writes with the restless, image-saturated intensity of the Surrealist milieu he inhabited, and the novel stands as one of the most psychologically audacious works of the twentieth-century French canon. Lehmann's elegant translation preserves the original's hypnotic, almost hallucinatory prose style, capturing the claustrophobic intimacy that makes the siblings' bond as seductive to the reader as it is fatal to those within it. A searing portrait of arrested adolescence and the destructive power of myth-making, Les Enfants Terribles asks whether those who refuse to grow up are romantics — or simply dangerous.