Monday 11 July 2016

Opium - Jean Cocteau


ICON BOOKS B1
NO DATE
LONDON, UK
FIRST PUBLISHED IN HARDBACK BY PETER OWEN LTD 1957
COVER DESIGN BY FISK

ABOUT THIS BOOK

In December 1928, Jean Cocteau entered a clinic near Paris hoping for a cure from opium addiction. He remained there some months and during this time wrote the main body of notes which form this book.

Cocteau himself describes OPIUM as the Diary of a Cure; but it is not a diary in the conventional sense for this is no mere record of day-to-day treatment, and it is  as different in style as it is in content from that other famous testimony of an opium eater by Thomas De Quincy.
Here then is an account-totally free from self-pity-by one of the greatest of living writers, of a deeply harrowing experience.

This first paperback edition of OPIUM includes many drawings that Cocteau made during his treatment which convey, even more graphically than the text. the splendours and miseries of drug addiction.

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