The Holy Innocents: A Romance

New York: E.P. Dutton, 1989. 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!. First American Edition. Burgundy Boards. Fine/Fine. 8vo - over 7¾" - 9¾" tall.