Thomas the Impostor by Jean Cocteau

TITLE: Thomas the Impostor
AUTHOR: Jean Cocteau
READ: January
THOUGHTS: Saw a copy of this for like five dollars at the Strand and bought it on a whim since I've never read any Cocteau and it looked short. I enjoyed it. I like Cocteau's writing. It has some of the stylistic elements that I think were probably popular in the early 20th century which lends a certain sense of confusion on the narrative level at times, though there are chunks of prose that are just wonderful. Like these:

"He was believed. He did not have to take precautions nor count the cost. A star of falsehood led him straight to his goal. And so he never had the preoccupied, hunted look of the trickster. Without knowing how to swim or how to skate he could say 'I skate and I swim.' Everyone had seen him on the ice and in the water." (pg. 50)

"On Sundays, with the machine-guns overhead shouting out the monotonous laughter of grinning skulls, and the engines whose droning would suddenly deepen from pale blue to black velvet, the officers of the Royal Navy played tennis." (pg. 77)

"He did not want to know if his love was reciprocated. He could say with Goethe: -- I love you; what is that to you?" (pg. 87)

"Yet deaths were of no consequence in the sector. Although a civilian death is the common lot, it keeps its prestige. Death can even award a certificate of good life and good behavior. People cannot help thinking, well! The man has just died. He is dead for all that. So he was not just anyone. Perhaps he was a better man than he seemed to be. But at the lines, as if the prevalence of death, wounds and continual risks made every man die more than once, death was converted into small change and lost its value. The rate of exchange was incredibly low. So the dialect of the sector seemed brutal to those who came from the land-of-few-deaths. Indeed, no-one said, "poor so and so," but "he could easily have taken cover." (pg. 114-115; there are some paragraph breaks in this section, but I am having trouble formatting them correctly, so, uhh, whatever!)

  Yeah, enjoyable stuff. I am curious to read more Cocteau. I felt like the depiction of WWI in this book was convincingly dream-like, with a glaze of un-reality that mollifies the experience of death/pain for the characters, which I assume was a necessary coping mechanism, at least that is what it appears like presented here. Reminded me at times of Tarkovsky's Ivan's Childhood.