Author Description

"Michele Bernstein's first novel, All the King's Horses (1960), is one of the odder and more elusive, entertaining, and revealing documents of the Situationist International. At the instigation of her first husband, Guy Debord, Bernstein agreed to write a potboiler to - allegedly - help swell the the group's coffers. She turned it instead into a witty and sensitive, yet anything but sincere, youth novel at once glamorizing and lampooning their own Parisian cultural environment." "Inspired by the success of Francoise Sagan's bestselling novel Bonjour Tristesse, Bernstein borrowed from both Sagan and Choderlos de Laclos' Dangerous Liaisons, concocting a roman a clef that succeeded on several levels. A moneymaker for the most radical front of the French avant-garde, the novel (by its very success) demonstrated the bankruptcy of contemporary French letters and the Situationist contempt for the psychological novel, while (perhaps unintentionally) holding up a playful mirror to the private lives of two of the Situationist International's most important members. All the King's Horses is a slippery rewrite of Dangerous Liaisons with Debord playing the role of cold libertine, Bernstein as his cohort, and disguised walk-on roles by the likes of the painter Asger Jorn and others."--book jacket.