Product Description

Guillaume Thomas is desperate for thrills, glamor and adventure. At just sixteen years old he knows the value of lying. Too young to fight, he assumes a noble ancestry and extra years to become a soldier. In this guise he meets the society Princess de Bormes and her impressionable daughter Henriette. While the princess pursues charity work with the wounded, Henriette falls in love with Guillaume. However, Guillaume, obsessed with his uniform and shiny revolver, is lost in the realms of fantasy. In the trenches he clings to his imposture, as he begins to grasp the real meaning of war.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #6412432 in Books
• Published on: 1983-05
• Original language: French
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 132 pages

Customer Reviews

Aimless introspection
Jean Cocteau's Thomas the Impostor, set in France at the beginning of World World I, evokes the atmosphere of a stay at the trenches. It parallels a overwrought society to the warring front, by describing the perils of love, the twisting wring of grief and the coiled fates of a group of disillusioned characters, including Thomas, the sixteen-years old "impostor" of the title, as they emulate the aimlessness and horror of the war only to incur the void and rage deceit leaves in us. This is an unforgettable story, steady in its besieging caustic strain and vicious in its lyrical puissance. Its realistic fold is only best conducted by the omniscient tussle with the absence of order or meaning or identity, rendered in a magical confusion that compels and appalls alike.
It is today of extraordinary interest to postmodern students and less haughty fans of great literature, given parallel expostulations by Maurice Blanchot in Thomas the Obscure and the great Italian Existentialist novel by Dino Buzzati, The Tartar Steppe; not to mention its illuminating comparison with Camus' Marsault and the recently surfaced Hungarian masterpiece of Marai The Rebels.
Jean Cocteau's art (theatre, film and surrealist doodling) is so highly regarded but here we most readily see it put to practice in a way that uses reason to express the unreasonable, the absurdity of identity and the violance of being.
The foreword by Gilbert Adair is exceptional and should not be skimmed, but read with voracious interest.

The art of delusion
I do not know of any other book that describes so well the mind of a liar. The last thought of the wounded hero is that he is going to pretend that he is dead, but he is dead already.
You cannot be more powerful than that. I have 2000 reasons to dislike Cocteau (just as you might dislike Truman Capote), but there is no denying this book.