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Synopsis
In May 1968, a brother and sister, young, clever and aristocratic, and incestuously involved, become friends with an American who is studying film in Paris. When their parents go on vacation, they invite the American to stay with them in their flat, where they start to play games.
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Reviews
The title characters of this rich, furiously concentrated first novel, set in Paris during the student uprisings of 1968, are 17-year-old twins Guillaume and Danielle and their friend Matthew, a 19-year-old American film student studying at the Cinematheque Francaise. Living in a huge apartment and virtually unnoticed by their father and his new wife, bored sophisticates Guillaume and Danielle pursue an obsessive incestuous relationship that becomes even more complicated when sexually confused Matthew moves in; in the author's deft phrasing, he is in love "with the single person Guillaume and Danielle would have been had they not been born twins." On their own, the three explore avenues of homosexuality, rape, incest and sadism that pull them away from the outside world and into starved, frightened squalor. When they finally reemerge, the Paris they see is almost unrecognizable. Adair depicts this scorching sexual triangle and the games that lead into it with knife-point psychological precision and gorgeously spun prose, but he also portrays the teenagers with a compassion that keeps the title (a reference to Cocteau's The Holy Terrors , which parallels and clearly inspires this work) from being wholly ironic.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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Seller Image
The Holy Innocents
Seller: Chaparral Books, Portland, OR, U.S.A.
Seller rating 5 out of 5 stars
Hardcover. Condition: Very Good. Dust Jacket Condition: Very Good. First Edition, first printing . Bound in burgundy paper covered boards over a burgundy cloth backstrip lettered in gilt. In very good condition with a solid binding and clean contents. Moderate foxing to the edges of the text block; remainder mark to the bottom edge. In a very good unclipped dust jacket showing some light handling. 8vo. 154pp. Seller Inventory # SELadaHI
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The Holy Innocents: A Romance
Published by
E.P. Dutton, New York, 1989
ISBN 10: 0525247882
ISBN 13: 9780525247883
Used
Hardcover
First Edition
Seller: Conover Books, Martinsville, VA, U.S.A.
Seller rating 5 out of 5 stars
Burgundy Boards. Condition: Fine. Dust Jacket Condition: Fine. First American Edition. A very crisp and clean first American edition, almost new and unread condition, gift quality! 154 very clean, unmarked and uncreased historical pages! Very very scarce and hard-to-find! Dj is nicely preserved in a brand new protective mylar plastic cover! "In that winter of 1968 in Paris, watching the movies is no longer enough ---- it's time to live them, and damn the consequences. As if to prove the point, the Cinematheque Fancaise shuts down and three of its most loyal rats ---- obsessive watchers of old movies ---- are left to their own devices. The three, the French twins Guillaume and Danielle and their American friend Matthew, decide to restage the movies, with special debt to the Cocteau of Les enfants terribles, in an empty Left Bank apartment. It begins with seemingly harmless film quizzes but soon descends into sexual role playing designed to exhilarate and mortify. Performing screen fantasies with their bodies, they withdraw little by little into a hermetically sealed universe of their own creation, an airless, obsessive universe of private games, ordeals, and humiliations. This vertiginous free fall into scripted sensual abandon is interrupted only when a paving stone comes flying through the window: the May riots of 1968 have begun. In a self-consciously sinuous prose style studded with aphorisms and allusions, Gilbert Adair has written a stunning tour de force about bruised purity and the voluptuousness of an irrecoverable moment in time." Extremely rare and out-of-print! Size: 8vo - over 7¾" - 9¾" tall. Seller Inventory # 027076