In the Library
Les Enfants Terribles
Jean Cocteau, 1929
- Form
- Form Novella
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Moderate
- Reading time
- Reading time 2 hours
- Chapters
- Chapters 16
- Length
- Length 25k words
£1.99
Read in the app, yours for good. Not yet by post.
The book unlocks on your account as soon as you buy it, so the 14-day right to cancel ends once it is unlocked.
In the public domain in the United States only: this edition is sold and read there and nowhere else.
A blow struck him full in the chest. A dark blow. A blow like a marble fist. A blow like a statue's fist.
What buying means
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- Read in the app’s own reader, with the original beside the translation where there is one.
- Downloaded, so it reads with no signal.
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About the book
A snowball thrown by Dargelos, the boy every classmate secretly worships, catches Paul full in the chest, and he goes down as though struck by something far heavier than snow. He is carried home to the room he shares with his sister Elisabeth, and stays there, half convalescent, half enthroned, while the two of them build a kingdom from one shared bed, a hoard of junk turned treasure, and a ritual they call the Game: a trance of insults neither can stop until the other cries mercy. Cocteau writes their world with the logic of a fairy tale and the nerve endings of adolescence, so that a photograph over the bed, or a phial of poison Paul has kept since childhood, carries the weight of scripture. Friends, lovers, even a sudden fortune wander in from outside and are absorbed or cast out by rules only brother and sister can read. It is a story about how completely two people can seal a world off from the world, gorgeous and airless at once, and the door that closes from the inside.