The Holy Terrors

(Les Enfants terribles)

Add to my list

by Jean Cocteau

Type

Adapted novel

Subject

One Film > The Terrible Children

Keywords

Jean Cocteau, novel

Publishing date

1966

Publisher

New Directions

Language

English

Relative size

Physical desc.

Paperback • 192 pages
5 ¼ x 8 inches (13.5 x 20.5 cm)

ISBN-10
ISBN-13

0-8112-0021-3
978-0-8112-0021-9

User Ratings

(0 vote)

X

Average rating:

0	rating	= We can do without
0	rating	= Good book
0	rating	= Excellent book
0	rating	= Unique / a reference

Your rating: -

Book Presentation:
Cocteau's novel Les Enfants Terribles, which was first published in 1929, holds an undisputed place among the classics of modern fiction.
Written in a French style that long defied successful translation―Cocteau was always a poet no matter what we was writing―the book came into its own for English-language readers in 1955 when this translation was completed by Rosamund Lehmann. It is a masterpiece of the art of translation of which the Times Literary Supplement said: "It has the rare merit of reading as though it were an English original." Lehrmann was able to capture the essence of Cocteau's strange, necromantic imagination and to bring fully to life in English his story of a brother and sister, orphaned in adolescence, who build themselves a private world out of one shared room and their own unbridled fantasies. What started in games and laughter because for Paul and Elisabeth a drug too magical to resist. The crime which finally destroys them has the inevitability of Greek tragedy. Illustrated with twenty of Cocteau's own drawings.

About the Author:
Jean Cocteau (1889–1963) was a French writer, poet, designer, draftsman, sculptor, filmmaker, and boxing manager. His list of friends―including New Directions’ founder James Laughlin―would read like a catalog of the stars of the twentieth-century avant-garde. He died of a heart attack after being informed of the death of his friend, the singer Edith Piaf.Rosamond Nina Lehmann (1901 – 1990) was a British novelist.

Press Reviews:
"The lasting feeling that his work leaves is one of happiness; not of course in the sense that it excludes suffering, but because, in it, nothing is rejected, resented, or regretted."
― W.H. Auden

"One of the master craftsmen."
― Tennessee Williams

See The Terrible Children (1950) on IMDB ...