Dave's Book Blog: "The Dreamers" by Gilbert Adair

Sunday, 1 November 2026

"The Dreamers" by Gilbert Adair

Three teenagers, Parisian twins Theo and Isabel and their fellow cinephile friend American Matthew, spend the summer of 1968 in sensual exploration while Parisians man the barricades. This coming of age novel brought to mind Jean Cocteau's Les Enfants Terribles with just perhaps a tiny hint of Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin.

i enjoyed the Bertolucci movie even though I saw it by accident, muddling it with another film called Dreamer. This book, dedicated to the three young stars of that movie, was rewritten after the movie which was based on Adair's debut novel called The Holy Innocents. The plot of the book differs from that of the film.

Although I am by no means enough of a cinephile to understand the movie references, nor enough of a francophile to be able to decipher the French lyrics quotes, I adored the book. Matthew, the third person protagonist, is a delightfully complex teenager, still unsure of his own sexuality (there is a laugh-out-loud scene in which he thinks, mistakenly, that a friend is coming out to him), lonely and socially inept, and bedazzled by the sophistication of his Parisian friends.

And there are some startlingly original lines.

Selected quotes:

“Under his jumble-sale clothes one imagined delicately chiseled ankle bones and subtle, shark’s-fin shoulder-blades.” (p 6)
“He appeared to walk on the tips of his toes without actually tiptoeing.” (p 7)
“He was also terrified that he hadn't properly read the small print of their relationship. He forgot that true friendship is a contract in which there can be no small print.” (p 8)
“A lonely man thinks of nothing but friendship, just as a repressed man thinks of nothing but flesh.” (p 8)
“There is fire and fire: the fire that burns and the fire that gives warmth, the fire that sets a forest ablaze and the fire that puts a cat to sleep. So is it with self-love.” (p 10)
“He couldn't decide whether or not they ought to be picked up between the ironic pincers of quotation marks.” (p 13)
“When two people agree it means one of them is redundant.” (p 14)
“He was like the player who would rather fumble the ball on the winning side than score a goal for the losers.” (p 14)
“If shit could shit ... it would smell just like your friend Jacques.” (p 17)
“As a Trappist monk takes a vow of silence, she had taken a vow of conversation.” (p 22)
“He cried out, But his heart is in the right place! - only to provoke these passers-by into screaming, No his heart is in the wrong place!” (p 25)
“Like every couple, in whatever manner conjoined, they formed a two-headed eagle, now pecking each other's eyes out, now fondly nuzzling each other's beaks.” (p 39)
“He stood up and ... walked out of the dining room with a gait so machine-like one would not have been too surprised to discover a wind-up key protruding from his back.” (p 61)
“Other people's parents are always nicer than our own ... Yet, for some reason, ... our own grandparents are always nicer than other people's.” (p 62)
“The thing was to make the right mistake, not the wrong one.” (p 78)
“Alas, the trouble with the flesh is not that it's weak but that it's strong.” (p 87)
“He ... stood before them, knees together, shivering slightly, like some arrowless Sebastian. ... free of the grubby chrysalis of his own clothes.” (p 98)
“Vengeance, says a French proverb, is a dish best eaten cold. It was clear that Theo preferred his piping hot. A chacun son gout, as the French also say.” (p 103)
“Days divided by nights as two frames of a film are divided by a black strip.” (p 126)
“Unhappiness may lie in our failing to obtain precisely the right sort of happiness.” (p 129)
“Fretful mothers hovered in the wings of demonstrations until, spotting their teenaged offspring, they would cuff them on the ear and drag them home, death to the immemorial objection that their pals had been permitted to stay.” (p 166)
“In his contorted features they could read the terrible truth that one not only dies alone, one dies alive.” (p 185)