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Books Like Les Enfants terribles by Jean Cocteau
The holy terrors — the incestuous game between siblings that excludes the adult world
Cocteau's 1929 novel of youthful transgression, written in three weeks during opium withdrawal — the claustrophobic bond between Paul and Elisabeth, their 'game,' and the double death when outside love penetrates it.
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Buy on AmazonLe Bal du comte d'Orgel
by Raymond Radiguet
Cocteau's most explicit literary love — Radiguet's posthumous masterpiece, which Cocteau edited and prepared for publication; reading Le Bal du comte d'Orgel alongside Les Enfants terribles gives the range of what the two writers meant to each other.
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Buy on AmazonLe Diable au corps
by Raymond Radiguet
Radiguet's first novel (1923) is the closest parallel — another short, intense narrative of transgressive passion narrated with psychological precision and without moral judgment; comparing the two gives the different sensibilities of the two writers who were closest in this period.
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La Princesse de Clèves
by Madame de Lafayette
The classical model for psychological precision in the novel of impossible love — Cocteau's economy and control in Les Enfants terribles descend from the same tradition of classical French prose that Radiguet invoked; both novels enact the point where passion destroys what it loves.
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Buy on AmazonLes Chants de Maldoror
by Comte de Lautréamont
The hallucinatory violence and the closed world of the siblings' game share the quality of Maldoror's closed universe — both texts treat the space inside their fiction as a complete and self-sufficient world that cannot be entered from outside without destruction.
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Buy on AmazonWuthering Heights
by Emily Brontë
The most powerful parallel in English literature — the ferocious bond between Heathcliff and Catherine that destroys everything around it has the same quality as the bond between Paul and Elisabeth: a love so intense it excludes the rest of the world and ends in death.
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Nadja
by André Breton
The contemporary Surrealist parallel (1928) — both Nadja and Les Enfants terribles were published in the same year and share the hallucinatory intensity of the Paris atmosphere, the world seen through obsessive attention; the comparison gives the range of what was possible in 1928–29 French prose.
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The Master and Margarita
by Mikhail Bulgakov
The closed world of the game and the open world that fails to understand it has a parallel in Bulgakov's novel — the relationship between the Master's private world and the Soviet world that cannot comprehend it; both novels are about the incompatibility of private intensity and public reality.
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Buy on AmazonLes Faux-Monnayeurs
by André Gide
Gide's novel (1925) is the major interwar French novel of adolescent life and its corruption — the boarding school world of Les Faux-Monnayeurs shares with Les Enfants terribles the subject of youth sealed off from adult understanding, though Gide's treatment is more sociological and Cocteau's more mythological.
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