Great erotica, snobby ass book

Filmen var bättre

The first incarnation of what would become Bernardo Bertolucci's controversial film The Dreamers, for which Adair wrote the screenplay and then later reworked into a novel of the same name. So basically this was my third experience with this story--I've both watched the film and read the novel several times--and The Holy Innocents is certainly the least of the three, and there's no getting around the fact that in a lot of ways this feels like the first draft of the story. Its best moments (namely, the first third of the novel) are retained in the later versions and many weaker elements were rightly discarded, including a long interlude at the twins's grandmother's estate in Normandy filled with Ouija boards and pretentious aristocratic relatives. Wearing its indebtedness to Cocteau's classic Les enfants terribles on its sleeve, the main problem is that the first act, brimming with cinema, sex and revolutionary politics is so vivid that Adair has nowhere to go but down (Bertolucci was unable overcome this flaw in the film version as well). Not essential reading in any way, and not of any interest to those not already interested in the material, but I quite enjoyed it.

"He was also terrified that he had not properly read the small print of their relationship. He forgot that friendship is a contract in which there can be no small print."

I've long held affection for Adair's sexy, cinema-saturated short novel, though revisiting it now now I found it functions more than anything as an aide-mémoire to a younger version of myself. In the 15+ years since my first read I've encountered a lot of literature that Adair is drawing from both overtly & impicitly, which made the depiction of transgressive sexuality feel not just a bit hollow, but sometimes downright silly. It rather reminded me of softcore film adaptations that use Sade or The Story of O as a justification to show copulation & lots of flesh but dispense with the deeper implications of sex, desire, & power those texts grapple with. Even Cocteau, though nowhere near as explicit, ultimately gets to something more kinky & feral, even depraved.

What does hold up, however, is the celebration of cinema, & the intensity of the pious cinephile life. The opening pages, nestled within the storied Cinémathèque Française of the 1960's, is tour-de-force, & gets at the religious fervor & ecstasy film can inspire in a way I still have never really encountered elsewhere. And the trio of American innocent abroad Matthew + the worldly twins Théo & Isabelle are tremendously appealing. Meanwhile, Adair's prose vacillates between feeling both overwritten & underwritten, sometimes within the span of a single page.

But even if I won't hold it up in such high regard now, it's still a fun, quick read that I quite enjoyed & will likely return to again at some point. It's been even longer since I've Bertolucci's adaptation, & now I'm curious how it will hold up.

If they chose to sit so close to the screen, it was because they couldn't tolerate not receiving a film's images first, before they had to clear the hurdles of each succeeding row, from spectator to spectator, from eye to eye, until, defiled, second-hand, reduced to the dimensions of a postage-stamp and ignored by the double-backed love-makers in the last row of all, they returned with relief to their source, the projectionist's cabin.

не знаю, чого я чекала від цієї книжки, але точно більшого. втім, то романізація сценарію – навряд чи можна з неї хотіти чогось надзвичайного.

voyeuristically cinematic and profane : but so quietly political (much to its advantage). the real object, or subject, rather, does not truly announce itself until the stone flies in through the window, shattering the insular, lunar world of les enfants dans le quartier: and in turn, jolting us, the readers, awake simultaneously to the reality.
it is a story about three adolescents with particular tastes growing up, figuring things out, their interests, their bodies and relations. and it is also a story about all those things but viewed from above, in the ether, as a map, as a metaphysical, metaphorical expression, confluence of politics, national incest, and assassinations of the intangible sort.
it is really a war against the bourgeois langour and nonchalance. dinner table ideas, philosophies and fight for the working class contrasted against the naked freedom of young adults who enact scenes in a dangerous game of exploitation and sexual reckoning.
here, love for cinema is a two-edged sword : as is poetry, and principle.