The Dreamers

Gilbert Adair

• Publisher: Faber & Faber
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9780571319817
• Edition: 0
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

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 Théo, 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 Cinémathèque Française. 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 Cinémathèque's closure, Théo, 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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Landing Page
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• The Cinémathèque Française is located in the sixteenth arrondissement of Paris
• ‘Have you seen the King?’
• Did Matthew love Théo and Isabelle?
• ‘Have you seen the King?’
• As the three of them walked down the path
• At a first glance the scene confronting them
• ‘Salut.’
• Jacques had shocking news
• Théo, who never read a newspaper
• The cinephiles had meanwhile dispersed
• On the slope descending from the esplanade
• They found a sheltered spot overlooking the scene
• From the metro station on the place de l’Odéon Matthew left his friends
• Sleep is a spirit
• Waiting
• He was still waiting
• It was half past three when Théo finally arrived
• Théo and Matthew, meanwhile, decided that they would take the metro
• On the place Saint-Germain-des-Prés a sword swallower was performing
• ‘Now!’ cried Théo
• Three abreast, they ran out of the Louvre
• On the horizon, as inescapable as the moon itself
• An unpleasant surprise was in store for them
• Like children who, in awe of its hunting horns
• In the place de l’Odéon
• Théo and Isabelle lived in a first-floor flat
• Isabelle entered the drawing room
• Dinner was a lugubrious affair
• From above, from somewhere in the ether
• Lighting a cigarette, beaming at Matthew
• Théo led Matthew to his own room
• It was now after midnight
• Later in the night, when the newsreel had long since run its course
• When he opened his eyes next morning
• Matthew had awoken into a state of semi-conscious malaise
• In the same bathroom
• Cleanliness is next to godliness
• ‘Here,’ said Théo
• Love is blind but not deaf
• It transpired that the flat did after all contain a wing of sorts
• It rained all day and the three friends stayed indoors
• Isabelle, for whom everything had to be given a name
• Let’s return to that first afternoon
• Walking back along the aisle
• Back at the hotel Matthew stuffed his belongings into a leather suitcase
• That evening Matthew dined with Théo and Isabelle
• The first few days were uneventful
• Isabelle was a subtle voyeur
• Most unexpectedly, though, from this raising of the stakes
• That evening no one tiptoed along the corridor
• Yet, for all that that first night together constituted a turning point
• During the two weeks that followed
• One evening, for the first time
• The Cinémathèque had been forgotten
• It was a spectacular Busby Berkeley production number
• So, amid all the laughter and steam
• Unhappiness may lie in our failing to obtain precisely the right sort of happiness
• Though these were becoming increasingly rare
• Hunger, though, began to rack their temples
• The world at large, meanwhile
• Then suddenly, like Peter Pan, the street flew in through the window
• They were not dead
• It was Théo who roused himself first
• It was at the corner of the street
• The carrefour was a wasteland
• An hour later, news having arrived that the CRS had turned off
• The absence of passers-by
• That same afternoon, to their surprise, the place Saint-Michel had been spared
• Paris was a carnival
• Théo was struck dumb
• As the café had become stuffy and overcrowded
• Leaving the bookshop
• It was exactly half past four when they arrived at the Drugstore
• By early evening, at half-past six, demonstrators converged
• Into this ravaged landscape
• Near the barricade behind which Théo, Isabelle and Matthew crouched
• Though, as we grow older
• Afterword
• About the Author
• Copyright