“Living is a horizontal fall.” #ParisinJuly2026 #20BOS26 Book 13

As I hinted in my end of June post and my review of “Women of Iron and Velvet”, I’ve been off down a number of rabbit holes recently, particularly with French authors. Jean Cocteau and Jean Genet were involved, and Margaret Crosland added complications as I did have to pick up a reasonably priced copy of her Cocteau biography! So when I was casting around for a book to read after my failure with “The Lighthouse Stevensons”, my eye fell on my Cocteau stacks and there sat “Opium”; translated by Crosland and Sinclair Road, it’s another one of those books which has been on the TBR so long that I have no idea when or where I got it. Fortunately, it turned out to be the perfect antidote to the Bathurst DNF!! My edition of this book was published in April 1972 in the intriguingly-named “New English Library Underground Classic” imprint. However, the text is copyrighted to Cocteau in 1930 and the subtitle of ‘Diary of a Cure’ hints at what the contents might be. However, I think the book is a…