Les Enfants Terribles

"This is a fantastic book which is also incredibly erotically charged, and explores the darker side of love. It’s 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. Yes, it’s a sadomasochistic novel. Not in a sexual way, but emotionally. The writing is very poetic and sparse. Jean Cocteau is an artist, and reading the book is a little like looking at a beautiful painting, where a lot is left out and you don’t really know what is going on half the time. It is evocative and poetic and beautiful and strange. It’s also very incestuous seeming. Elisabeth and Paul are completely obsessed with each other and might as well be shagging, but they’re not. There’s no actual sex in the book, but there’s a lot of admiration of beauty of all kinds. It’s just restrained enough for them not to be having sex with each other. I think incest is a good thing to explore in literature, because it’s such a taboo that where else can it be explored? There’s no harm in reading about it. It’s a great book for younger clients in their early twenties, because it’s about people of that age. It shows the dangers of having too obsessive a love for any one person – and particularly avoiding it with a sibling! It sets alarm bells ringing for people who have an obsessive love of someone, which does happen particularly at that kind of age, in university and just after. It’s also a book I have prescribed to older, more jaded clients, as a way to reignite their own feelings of love and desire for their partners, or even just for life itself. And for younger people to fall in love with youth again. 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."