Background
Gilbert Adair was born on December 29, 1943 in Edinburgh, Scotland, United Kingdom.
(This book evokes Jean Cocteau’s film Les Enfants Terrible...)
This book evokes Jean Cocteau’s film Les Enfants Terrible, but also includes references to French New Wave masters such as Jean-Luc Godard and Jacques Rivette. This novel concerns the increasingly sordid pastimes enjoyed by a pair of movie-loving twins and their American friend. Listener reviewer Gavin Millar noted that the three protagonists’ relationship degenerates “from sensuality to perverse eroticism and ends in violent nightmare”.
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1988
(Love and Death on Long Island, Adair’s next novel, consti...)
Love and Death on Long Island, Adair’s next novel, constitutes another excursion into degradation. Here an aging writer, who long ago rejected much of contemporary culture, finds himself obsessed with a teen idol, whereupon he becomes immersed in homosexual pornography as a means of vicariously gratifying his rampant desires. This novel, which has been perceived as a spoof of Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice, was decried by New Statesman and Society reviewer Zoe Heller as “mean and demeaning”.
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1998
(Paris in the spring of 1968. The city is beginning to eme...)
Paris in the spring of 1968. The city is beginning to emerge from hibernation and an obscure spirit of social and political renewal is in the air. Yet Theo, his twin sister Isabelle and Matthew, an American student they have befriended, think only of immersing themselves in another, addictive form of hibernation: moviegoing at the Cinematheque Francaise. Night after night, they take their place beside their fellow cinephiles in the very front row of the stalls and feast insatiably off the images that flicker across the vast white screen. Denied their nightly 'fix' when the French government suddenly orders the Cinematheque's closure, Theo, Isabelle and Matthew gradually withdraw into a hermetically sealed universe of their own creation, an airless universe of obsessive private games, ordeals, humiliations and sexual jousting which finds them shedding their clothes and their inhibitions with equal abandon. A vertiginous free fall interrupted only, and tragically, when the real world outside their shuttered apartment succeeds at last in encroaching on their delirium. The study of a triangular relationship whose perverse eroticism contrives nevertheless to conserve its own bruised purity, brilliant in its narrative invention and startling in its imagery, The Dreamers (now a major film by Bernardo Bertolucci) belongs to the romantic French tradition of Les Enfants Terribles and Le Grand Meaulnes and resembles no other work in recent British fiction.
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2004
(Adair’s third novel derives from a controversy that ensue...)
Adair’s third novel derives from a controversy that ensued after the death of admired critic and educator Paul de Man, who was posthumously revealed to be the author of anti-Semitic works from the Nazi era. Leopold Sfax, the hero of Adair’s novel, attempts to obscure his past through the unlikely imposition of his own ambiguous theories on the offensive texts in question. But Sfax’s efforts at deception result in further complications that, in turn, continue to jeopardize his eminent standing. Spectator reviewer John Spurling noted that “the subject and setting are inescapably Nabokovesque,” and he called Adair’s novel “a highly polished piece of postmodernist marquetry.”
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1933633573/?tag=2022091-20
2008
film critic journalist novelist author
Gilbert Adair was born on December 29, 1943 in Edinburgh, Scotland, United Kingdom.
Among Adair's early works of fiction there are such works as Alice Through the Needle's Eye and Peter Pan and the Only Children. From 1992 to 1996 Gilbert Adair wrote the "Scrutiny" column for The Sunday Times. During 1998 and 1999 he worked as a chief film critic of The Independent on Sunday, where in 1999 he also wrote a year-long column called "The Guillotine".
(Adair’s third novel derives from a controversy that ensue...)
2008(This book evokes Jean Cocteau’s film Les Enfants Terrible...)
1988(English translations of classic French fairy tales for ad...)
1996(Love and Death on Long Island, Adair’s next novel, consti...)
1998(Sequel to Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland and Through...)
1985(Paris in the spring of 1968. The city is beginning to eme...)
2004Quotations: "Obviously there are gay themes in a lot of my novels but I really wouldn't be happy to be thought of as a 'Gay Writer' ... Being gay hasn't defined my life."
Adair was known for the intelligence and playfulness with which he invests his works, regardless of genre, and for the multiplicity of allusions that are likewise an inevitable aspect of his varied writings. Gilbert Adair himself was homosexual, though he rarely talked about the matter, not wishing to be labelled.