Jean Genet wrote masterpieces,this autobiography is a masterpiece in itself !

Jean Genet wrote masterpieces...this autobiography is a masterpiece too !!!

Jean Genet's major works are considered masterpieces. His plays, The Screen and The Blacks are performed worldwide. During his lifetime, he received the Grand Prix des Arts et Lettres and he is remembered for championing the causes of the oppressed. Yet, surprisingly, for many years, no biography of Genet had been attempted. Writers could have been intimidated by Sartre's huge psychological study, St. Genet, published in 1952, or perhaps by the elusive nature of Genet, himself, and his complex morality.

In 1987 Edmund White began what became a six-year study of Genet's life and works. The result of that work is this book, Genet, a shining and enduring biography that shares much in common with Starkie's excellent biography of Rimbaud and Ellman's Oscar Wilde.

White read Genet's Our Lady of the Flowers for the first time in 1964. He responded to Genet's "deeper, more extravagant prose," and, in doing so, he experienced a self-liberation as the gay world was presented without apology or explanation and gay men were afforded the experience of seeing their world, not as tacky but as glamorous and poetic. In addition, Genet's affectionate rendering of drag queens helped to elevate their view in the eyes of all.

White, who had tested HIV-positive in 1985, was grateful for the chance to work on the biography as it also afforded him the opportunity to reflect on his own homosexuality, art and literature in a world not yet affected by the AIDS virus, for Genet had inhabited a world and culture prior to the outbreak of AIDS.

In this sensitive biography, White takes us on a journey through the French welfare and prison systems; high society led by Cocteau; café society led by Sartre; and revolutionary movements as well.

In Genet: A Biography, White shows us that Genet's work, like Genet, himself, is a terrain of contradictions, and he spells out both the kindnesses and the cruelty with sincere and translucent clarity.

Genet began life in 1911 as a ward of the state. Raised as an outcast, by a young age he was attempting to come to terms with his sensitive and convulsive nature. At the age of thirteen he began lying and stealing; by fourteen, he was branded a thief, something he accepted with arrogance rather than shame. At fifteen, he was arrested and led, in handcuffs, into the Penitentiary Colony of Mettray.

At Mettray, he worked in the fields and performed naval drills on landlocked ships. By night, however, the prisoners lived by their own code. The handsome, sadistic heterosexual was king, and someone, like Genet, passive and adoring, not only served, but blossomed as a princess and a scribe.

As brutal as life was for Genet in Mettray, he cherished his time there, for he experienced many awakenings within its walls. The time in Mettray also afforded Genet a chance to look inward. What he saw caused him tremendous anguish, for he had to face the realization that he did, indeed, possess all the evil that others had attributed to him. His suffering, however, only made him strong.

Destitute, but free at nineteen, Genet began a decade of wandering through Europe and Africa, passing from one prison to another for one petty crime or another. In 1939, in a prison cell in Fresnes, Genet began his masterpiece, Our Lady of the Flowers. Figuratively, he wrote in martyr's blood, for the book represented a reopening of all his adolescent wounds.

As Genet wrote of his early loves in his cell at Mattray, modern literature found society's most marginal men portrayed, for the first time, without shame or remorse. White clearly points out that Genet never used his writing as a political or psychological forum, yet his books sparked furious debates over censorship in the courts of Europe. What Genet did do was open the door for future writers and, most importantly, confer dignity and understanding on society's least understood and most estranged.

Genet had not set out to do so, but he had created a kind of miracle. Social change began to take place, and the president of France, at Sartre's urging, pardoned Genet of all his crimes. However, as White theorizes, this pardon also stripped Genet of his sacred individuality, his uniqueness, and he fell into a deep depression and ceased all writing.

A relationship with the sculptor, Alberto Giacometti, however, conferred on Genet new meaning and purpose and he said, "every man is every other man, as am I."

Resuming his life as a vagabond, Genet discovered untapped inner resources and a wealth of creative ideas. His importance as a poet emerged.

Genet's last years were filled with suffering, when, addicted to drugs and suffering from cancer, he dedicated himself to the plight of the Palestinians; rootless warriors lacking a champion, much like himself. His final work, Prisoner of Love, is dedicated to these people and to life, itself, and the power of the creative imagination. This was Genet's final miracle: the realization that we are all holy, that we all contain, both the whole and the part, of the divine.

Genet died at the age of seventy-five, on 15 April 1986 in a hotel room in the thirteenth arrondissement of Paris. He is buried in Larache, Morocco and his grave bears only two sun-washed, sparkling white stones. Although Genet's body may lie beneath the Moroccan sand, his spirit still soars, crowned with the blood of his youth and the thorn-studded roses of old age.

In Jean Genet's complex novel The Thief's Journal, the author has modeled his protagonist, Jean, on himself, and the loose, conversational plot after his own experiences as a young thief, drifter, and poet in thirties and forties Europe. 'Jean' is Genet's fictional recreation of himself; but readers should keep in mind that Jean's relationship to Genet is to some degree imaginative. The book provides an excellent illustration of how even when speaking or writing with as complete an honesty as believed possible, man is still caught in a process of creation, structuring, and discrimination-a process of fictionalization. Therefore, honesty, sincerity, and truthfulness always retain elements of artifice, and, as pure states, remain ideals only.

Abandoned by his family as a boy, sentenced to reform school at sixteen, as a young man, Jean is still "alone, rigorously so," he lives "with desolation in satanic solitude." Realizing early that he is, in status and nature, completely at odds with the social order, Jean learns through trial and error how to care and not to care, how to make all possible outcomes to his actions reasonably acceptable. "Rejecting the world that rejected me," Jean exacerbates his position: identifying with his rejectee status, he feels it appropriate that he should "aggravate this condition with a preference for boys." Thus his homosexuality is at least partially an act of self-creation, part of his perverse desire to transgress the rules of order as broadly as possible. Jean decides he will henceforth admit to guilt whenever accused, regardless of the truth or the nature of the crime, and thus rob his accusers of the ability to jeopardize his fate.

"Betrayal, theft, and homosexuality are the basic subject of this book," he says. For Jean, theft becomes a means of survival while simultaneously representing a daily blow against society. If caught and arrested, he readily throws himself into the homosexual life of the prison, making himself available to those in authority as well as to fellow inmates. Jean allows himself a somewhat desperate game of searching for a dominant male partner who is completely, impossibly powerful. Submitting physically and emotionally to men he believes meet this standard, Jean repeatedly proves himself the more powerful by betraying the men when he inevitably senses a definitive crack in his exaggerated conception of them. Once he has glimpsed some "inelegant," unforgivable portion of their imperfect humanity, his slavish masochism fades and sociopathic indifference replaces it: the abandonee becomes the abandoner and assassin. For Jean, a well-planned, keenly-felt personal betrayal is the ultimate show of toughness and "a handsome gesture, compounded with nervous force and grace."

As in Genet's other novels, homosexual love and physical interaction is a given between all of the male characters--pimps, prostitutes, gamblers, gangsters, and thugs--each of whom has a theoretical set of rules and limits concerning the degree of their own participation. But regardless of their speeches and proud macho denunciations, they loosen their belts for one another at a moment's notice if they feel so inclined. Genet cleverly has Jean reacting and reporting in the same indeterminate manner: Jean identifies Michaelis as wholly homosexual but then denies it; one-armed stud Stilitano, who wears a bunch of artificial grapes buttoned inside his fly to lure strangers and enhance his mystique, routinely denies Jean access to his body at night but coyly raises the subject repeatedly during daylight hours. Regardless, Stilitano and Jean live and share a bed together, affectionately plucking one another clean of head and body lice. Ugly Salvador strikes Jean on the street for kissing him in public while simultaneously whispering, "tonight, if you like," in his ear. When hairy Armand decides he respects Jean too much to be anything other than friends, Jean sleeps between his open legs, Armand's colossal sex organs resting nightly on his forehead.

Only gorilla-like, Paul Muni-faced Java is wholly unconcerned with the nature of his acts or words. He provocatively exposes himself to other men in saloons, daring them to hold and guess the weight of his genitals, and repeatedly forces himself on willing Jean, who, gloriously obliterated by Java's assault, finds it a blissful but inevitably temporary salvation. Java "cringes in fright" during a fight, and Jean sees even his cringing as beautiful. But then "yellow diarrhea flows down his monumental thighs," and--well, so much for Java. Clinging to his masochistic illusion, Jean continues drifting, his submissive position a seeming necessity. When discovered sleeping in a beachfront shack by a guard, Jean services him automatically and the guard accepts it automatically as a given in turn. These are the strange, all-encompassing rules of Genet's world. But free or imprisoned, single or partnered, masochist or sly sadist, Jean is ultimately self-fulfilling and independent.

Jean, who says "metamorphosis lies in wait for us," is an almost unknown quintessence, a mass of animal meat and instincts coupled with emerging homo sapien characteristics. Constantly in a liminal state of becoming, he atavistically prefers stepping sideways or backward instead of forward; for long periods his existence seems mere ostensible movement through time and space. But Jean, who in fact secretly enjoys and protects his isolation, really seeks only to fulfill himself "in the rarest of destinies," a kind of quest for "sainthood," one born of reducing himself to pure essence and thus becoming his own temple, savior, and deity. On this final road, which Jean sees reachable by both subjective and objective methods, including sacred betrayal, there is in truth no room for anyone but himself, as there will be none afterward when he has attained his goal of becoming a selfless but self-complete being, like Jung's psychological, alchemical, and hieratical hermaphrodite.

The Thief's Journal is a full-frontal, multi-layered book that should be read several times to be fully appreciated. One of the finest portrayals of the introverted character in literature, The Thief's Journal has a great many things to express about man's nature and psychology, most of which should be revelatory if somewhat jarring to the general reader.

This book is mesmerising. The distinction between the beautiful and the obscene is folded inside out like a velvet glove. Abjection has never seemed so appealing.

I don't think I would categorize The Thief's Journal as Gay fiction. I would allign it more with existentialism/metaphysics in that Genet's sensibilities and motives lie in other areas than solely his own homosexuality. Genet seeks to travel deeper and deeper within himself in order to reject "your world" as well as its inherent value and morals systems. I think his own homosexuality is among one of the many plateaus or steps that he uses in his "journey". As he says, his life was open to his own interpretation; the signs were interpreted in his own way for his own purposes. Sometimes Genet's prose is heavy in that his lines are long and he uses run-ons separated by commas. He takes great care in his descriptions (necessarily so) such as the gob of white saliva in the corner of someone's mouth. The work is another bold gesture by a man who brings the reader as close to the author as is seemingly possible. Another reviewer here says to check out Celine. Make sure to read the editions translated by Ralph Mannheim, he's superb.

Genet allows you to feel the immediacy of the Palestinian situation with particles from lives,from ill-defined fragments of lives disrupted with no future,he stayed with a family in 1980 a half-day and a whole night where the young son,Hamza a fedayee went off at night to fight. Genet hearing gun fire in the distance inhabited his bed and was brought Turkish coffee and water in the night as a replacement for the young man,by his mother. Genet is a writer/poet,a political thinker,but never a man of politics, a deeply sensitive man,a virtuoso of the sensual image, as the starry-night reflected against the curtain in his room with the small blue table. "Of course it's understood that the words,nights,forests,septet,jubilation desertion and despair are the same words that I have to use to describe the goings on at dawn in the Bois de Boulogne in Paris when the drag queens depart after celebrating their mystery,doing their accounts and smoothing banknotes out of the dew."

Genet was allowed with special permission to visit the massacre site at the camps at Sabra and Chantila,smelling the rotting flesh, "They happened I was affected by them. I talked about them. But while the act of writing came later, after a period of incubation,nevertheless in a moment like that or those when a single cell departs from its usual metabolism and the original link is created of a future,unsuspected cancer,or a piece of lace, so I decided to write this book."

Genet has an intense need for passion of any dimension,scouring the vigours of whatever parts of fragments of the lifeworld's complexity presents itself to him. I once thought of this book as a romantic means of portrayel a betrayel of a political situation,one, the only one that excited Genet.It means something that only encounterings lives in struggle,bent into a repressive state that Genet finds the only life worth encountering,sensing and feeling about. This book was completed in 1986 after suffering from throat cancer, he died on the night of 14-15th of April,1986,while correcting proofs.

This book is absolutely essential to any understanding of the Palestinian situation. It is also the mostimportant work of Genet's entire career.

Genet based 'The Maids' on an actual event, one he felt a certain kin-ship with. In 1933 french police found Madame Lancelin and her daughter face down, in their living room, utterly mutilated. The eyes had disappeared, all teeth had been knocked out, fragments of bone and flesh were strewn about the floor, walls covered in blood. Upstairs the two servant-maids, the Papin sisters, were found naked, huddled together in one of two single beds. Immediately they confessed. Immediately, also, the papers picked up the story. The public was facinated how these two soft-spoken, mild-mannered girls, without provocation could have acted with such wild brutality. Senseless, irrational violence - Genet's speciality. He uses this story as a means to attack conformaty. A massive revolt against obedience, servitude, and the upperclass. A bloody triumph of individuality . Like other of Genet's works, it primaraly is concerned with Man's free will, or lack there-of. It is an existential story , revealing the darker sides of freedom, and the horror of the responsibility that comes with it. A tale worthy of Genet's genious. Exellent translation. Fans of Genet should also Check out Octave Mirbeau.

'Grandly conceived and executed' .... 'Magnificent'.... 'Nothing less than masterly' ... critical tributes offered Sartre's Saint Genet that end as mere words. Saint Genet is an unearthly book wrought with the passion of a gospel narrative, explicit and wrenching. It is, finally, an entire act of redemption. The language is apocryphal and never operatic, epic in delivery, even greater than it seems; page upon page of an exceeding pure, and never vulgarly rich, damask brocade! I'll not critique Sartre's thought --it's privilege enough to be presented it!-- but this seminal work is a miraculous construct of human will and unbearable genius that will live forever, a complex and magisterial book ranking among the great achievments of modern literature because of its erudition, humanity, and fierce literary reach. There is not a page that doesn't honor wisdom, nor is there a single idle component. It is indisputably Sartre's crowning achievment as a genius, and as a man. The evocative humanity of two literary giants of the 20th century plays like a dance, the captured aesthetic of which Sartre reveals; everything is taken to the temple of Genet, everything explained, everything mortified, slain and remade. Reading this book is a revealing experience; be willing to be stolen. Theft happens in broad daylight, perpetrators already known.. My favorite chapter is 'Cain,' in which Sartre makes his most profound arguments about Genet as Other, Genet as the living inverse Liturgy, and presents a stupefying image of his subject: 'Everything is possessed, worked, occupied, from the sky to the subsoil...' Intimidating in its greatness.

"The Selected Writings of Jean Genet" by Edmund White is arguably the best book to read if you are not familiar with Genet's writing. White is a biographer of Genet, but more importantly he is a great fan. The book includes his brief comments at the beginning of all the excerpts, which include portions of novels, plays, short stories, essays, and an interview. The comments lay out some background information which a first-time Genet reader will find useful. After reading this book, I read many of Genet's works and each time found myself referring to "Selected Writings" for added help in understanding and analysis

The perferct mix of avant-garde art which represents a philosophy. The framed narrative, its necessity that is, is the only aspect of the work I would question. A must read of the French writers.

Jean Genet's seminal Our Lady Of The Flowers (1943) is generally considered to be his finest fictional work. The first draft was written while Genet was incarcerated in a French prison; when the manuscript was discovered and destroyed by officials, Genet, still a prisoner, immediately set about writing it again. It isn't difficult to understand how and why Genet was able to reproduce the novel under such circumstances, because Our Lady Of The Flowers is nothing less than a mythic recreation of Genet's past and then - present history. Combining memories with facts, fantasies, speculations, irrational dreams, tender emotion, empathy, and philosophical insights, Genet probably made his isolation bearable by retreating into a world not only of his own making, but one over which he had total control.

The imprisoned narrator "Jean," who may or may not be identical with the author, masturbates regularly; like a perpetual motion machine, his fantasies fuel his writing and his writing spurs on his fantasies in turn. Nothing illustrates this more than the brief scene in which self - sustaining "Jean" describes his Tiamat.... Legs thrown over shoulders, "Jean" is not only the serpent that eats its tail but becomes a small, circular, self - imbibing universe all his own. A motto attributed to the alchemists could be the narrator's own: "Every man his own wife."

Though the narrative is not the primary focus of this or any of Genet's novels, most responsible critics have failed to remark on the fact that the narrative of Our Lady Of The Flowers is the least compelling of any found in his five major novels. Our Lady Of The Flowers, does, however, lay the basic groundwork for the novels to come: The Miracle Of The Rose, Funeral Rites, Querelle, and The Thief's Journal (all written between 1944 and 1948).

While Our Lady Of The Flowers is Genet's only novel to feature a predominantly effeminate homosexual man (Divine, who is at least partially a transvestite) as its protagonist ("Our Lady Of The Flowers," a virile young thug, is a secondary character), most of the other elements of the book will be very familiar to those who have read the balance of his fiction. Transvestites and transvestite figures abound, as do handsome, amoral, and homosexual or bisexual "toughs," jokes and extended vignettes concerned with lice, flatulence, constipation, and feces, mordant examinations of manhood and the criminal's code of honor, obsession with personal power through emotional betrayal, the long vagabond road to "sainthood," theft, masochistic love, prostitution, and vivid examples of the way in which physical desire and sexuality secretly and subtly fuel, in Genet's view, almost every aspect of life. As in portions of his other novels, the characters here, even the swaggering, virile young men, are known among their friends by fey pet names like "Darling Daintyfoot," "Mimosa," and "Our Lady of the Flowers," which are intended to be simultaneously affectionate and mocking. To further confuse, Divine is referred to as a "he" and referred to his surname during his youth and as a "she" and "Divine" in maturity. As in the Miracle of the Rose and Funeral Rites, characters mesh into one another, exchange identities, and move backward and forward through time at the narrator's whim. Both "Jean" and the individual characters fuse their own and each other's personalities together as needed, and all occasionally lose control of this process: but Jean Genet, master puppeteer, never does.

Genet's readers are probably aware of the existence of haughty establishment critics who pretentiously embrace Genet's work but nonetheless treat it like something best held at the end of a very long stick. "Evil" is the word most commonly used to describe Genet's fiction by stuffy, anxious middlebrow critics who, while distressingly stimulated by his work, feel duty - bound to officially decry its potential for pernicious influence. Many artists are said to create a "moral universe" within the body of their work; Genet is one of the few that actually does, though his is a mirror universe where amorality reigns. Genet's world is so exclusively concerned with flea - ridden prostitutes, child murderers who don't wipe themselves, handsome pimps who eat what they scratch out of their noses, [prostitutes] with rotting teeth, strutting, uneducated alpha male hustlers, and masochistic sodomites -- bourgeois emblems of horror all -- that the question of "evil" as such in Genet's work becomes obsolete.

While Genet loves and personally glorifies his memories, fictional recreations and their outcast lifestyles, he never objectively condones their actions to his audience. In all of his novels, Genet finds beauty, suffering, and vulnerability - humanity - in everyone, thus setting a far better example than his hypocritical reviewers. There is as much "evil" in Genet's books as there is represented by any typical novel's reality principle (for example, all of Genet's characters reveal more humanity and innate dignity than the crass, vacuous crowd Nick Carraway falls in with in Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby) or, for that matter, as there is in the lives of those unstable, morally - confused critics who are simply too cowardly to recognize the world as the diverse, dangerous, devouring, and unstable place that it is. If Our Lady Of The Flowers proves anything, it's that fifty years after its initial publication, the book is still effectively upsetting the wormy apple carts Genet intended it to.

From the standpoint of Jung's psychological types, Genet's feeling and sensation functions probably predominated in both his life and his writing. However, his thinking and intuition functions were clearly constellated as well, giving Our Lady Of The Flowers and the masterpieces that followed it unmatched macrocosmic perceptiveness, poetic resonance, and gripping, all - inclusive dramatic power. Like alchemical "totality" the hermaphrodite, a shaman, or a legitimate Christian saint, mystic Genet seems to have written from a state of undifferentiated consciousness and enjoyed a state of perpetual participation mystique with life.

Somebody should make an opera of this book! I've loved this book since high school, perhaps more than all the others! Genet as always is like a dark narcotic; impossible to shake, and constantly ecstatic. His genius is like a kind of suffocating honey on the page, it pulls your heart out. This edition has a substantive Introduction by Sartre, whose "Saint Genet" is one of the seminal books of the late twentieth century. If you've never read Genet, you've got something coming! What is there to say about literature of this standing? Read it and be ennobled.

This collection of letters by Jackson is well worth reading for several reasons. First, as several other reviewers point out, it provides a valuable (if by now slightly dated) insight into the American penal system. Second, it illustrates the tragedy of people with Jackson's potential being diverted (whether you believe by racism, socio-economic circumstances, poor judgment, or whatever) into the self-perpetuating criminal/penal complex. However, I think some of the raves are overrated. Jackson clearly was an intelligent man who could have accomplished much if his engergies were otherwise directed. But he lacks perspective; the tone is often stridently self-justifying, and he lacks any real moral insight into the magnitude of the violence and pain he inflicted on others.

This is a great collection of the prison letters of the Black Panther prison leader George Jackson. Only problem is that we don't see the letters that George jakcson is responding to, so that we may get a better context of what's going on here. It would also be interesting to see what Bill Cosby had/has to say about Jackson's criticism of him (for Cosby's role as a CIA agent in the "I Spy" show of the 60s).

A must read for people of all ages, races, nationalities, genders, classes, et. al. A masterpiece of the form. Gloriously flawed, like all of us. So much more than the sum of its parts. George and Jonathan Live.

Genet's second novel is a phantasmagorical account of his youthful incarceration in the Mettray penal colony and subsequent imprisonment in the adult facility of Fountevrault. The author portrays Mettray as a womb like hive of sunless corridors and constricting passages that both shelters the prisoners and guards and incubates their stark attempts at individual development. The formless men of Mettray constantly meld and mesh into one another, existing between mental and emotional states of absolute being and permanent dissolution and drift. Genet sees the hieratical Mettray as "the universe itself," something he finds "fabulous." Surrounded by 400 other confined men, many who are attractive and apparently virile, young Genet searches for potential lovers and models upon which he might base his coreless identity.

The narrator identifies these young men as his literal brothers, born from the same maternal body of childhood desolation leading to crime, and is highly drawn to this incestuous angle of his attractions. He describes the other boys "stroking themselves" in unison alone in their single unit cells, the mixed perfume of wisteria and rose vines creating a "vegetable incest" which wafts over their dreaming heads; he "yearns for a mother," feels he's returned, via Mettray, to "the mother's throbbing breast," and describes the prison and his mood as permanently tinted in autumnal shades. The female principle reasonably dominates the state of male immaturity, and in both benevolent and malevolent fashion, for Mettray is surrounded by a minefield of "traps laid by women's hands" that create an "invisible, undetectable danger" which throws would be escapees into "wild panic." For hoping to gain the fifty franc reward that comes with each capture, local women lie in silent, unseen wait like archetypal witches, accompanied by shotguns, pitchforks, and dogs.

Unloved, cast out, and uneducated, the instinctively virility-seeking boys of Mettray are little more than unindividuated eggs united in a desperate search for a master sperm bearer to fertilize and transform them into legitimate men. Each acts as a 'double' for another, but combined, the two halves still add up to less than one definite being. Though some "big guys" and "toughs," especially mysterious Christ figure Harcomone act as witting or unwitting father substitutes to those in need, Mother conquers in the end. Returning years later to find Mettray in ruins, Genet sadly notes that swallows have built their nests in its window ledges, grass sprouts between the impregnable stones, and thorn bearing vegetation covers and "pierces" the place. The rugged house of troubled, fragile lads has returned to the soil forever.

Fifteen years later, at Fountevrault, Genet finds hero and double murderer Harcomone locked in irons in solitary confinement, condemned to death. He discovers Fountevrault's foundational hub when he stumbles upon former Mettray lover Divers, a powerful and handsome tough, freakishly squatting atop the central iron cone which serves as a toilet, his genitals exposed and hanging as he defecates loudly, surrounded as he is by the circle of punished and endlessly marching prisoners he oversees and verbally abuses daily. Thus the lord of Fountevrault is an unconscious, ridiculous clown and fool, his pointed punishment and dunce cap under him instead of atop his head. Nonchalant Divers, "a barbaric king on a metal throne" gets up "without wiping" and actively resumes command as Genet allows himself the pleasure of sniffing Divers' "vast and serene" bowel gases. Drunk with sensation, Genet commits a willful infraction and happily joins Divers' marching circle, which becomes his new microcosm of "eternal reoccurrence."

While the broad shouldered "big guys" gather in all alpha male groups like a huddle of mountain gorillas, Genet loves--and often confuses--three men. Divers; dying, crown-of-thorns bearing god and great subject of prison gossip Harcomone; and mercurial "chicken" Pierrot, who straddles the safer middle ground and whose essence contains elements of both men. Genet sees Pierrot as a Sphinx and himself as a "questioning Oedipus," he describes their desperate lovemaking, clandestine stairwell meetings, and risking note passing, but later says they were never lovers and met only on twelve occasions. Divers and Harcomone are the twin father kings of Fountevrault: earthy, feces smeared Divers, who upholds macho postures even while defecating, symbolizes the Genet's reality principle. Supernatural Harcomone, the single complete man, "the emanation of a power stronger than himself," is even loved and cherished by the stars, moon, and seas -- by nature, his transcendent bride. Paternal Harcomone had once read nightly to the youths at Mettray from a book intended for very small children; now his chains blossom fragrantly into white roses before the astonished prisoners, an experience divinely denied the guards. Harcomone's rapidly approaching execution by beheading becomes a crisis for everyone under Fountevrault's roof.

Active mystic Genet calls himself "the spirit that hovers over the shapeless mass of dreams," "a dead man who sees his skeleton in the mirror," one who "sings the void" and who strains "every fiber to see very high or very far within himself." By "cutting all threads" that hold him to the world, he "plunges" into "prison, foulness, dreaming, and hell," believing this will land him in a garden "of saintliness where roses bloom." Exhausting himself with the effort, he manages, by a kind of remote viewing, to project himself into the condemned man's cell during the last nights of Harcomone's life, where he finds Harcomone already a ghost, his spirit drifting through the prison, and visited by specters.

Perhaps Genet's most deeply felt novel, the meditative Miracle of the Rose finds the author alternately confronting and avoiding his deepest obsessions and the shadowy motivators stirring uncomfortably within him. The archetypal "ghosts" of the male and female parental figures, in both their nurturing and paralyzing aspects, constantly overwhelm Genet's consciousness, are projected, embodied (Genet, the bride, is officially wedded to Divers in an elaborately structured midnight ceremony) or obscurely grappled with during moments of reverie. Transvestite figures and shifting configurations of gender and persona abound; male identity, like the ever shifting and unsustainable ocean shoreline, is in constant, painful flux, perpetually threatened with an obscuring inundation that will reduce man back to his earliest, in utero female state of existence.

A breathtaking, uplifting work -- mesmerising & unflinching of beauty wherever it is found. One hears people talk about an infinite capacity to bear pain -- it is not so different as the capacity to bear infinite beauty. If you want the example of such a man, read Genet.

The sheer intensity of this book, its fearlessness, its devotion to what is human, is astonishing. This was the first Genet novel I read, & I was converted. Genet understands that what is human is also that which is superhuman, and subhuman.

Jean Genet is the most exquisite of the poets maudits. Every word of him has the bittersweet savour of the pleasures of hell. You'll love his obsession whit nasty hoodlums which he transmogrifies in almost saintly objects of desire. Genet is an artist on sublimating the most earthly feeling in almost mystical esperiences, and in giving the most dreary places and situations a sensual or mystic (you almost cannot distinguish )
aura, as he does in this book. Jean Genet is one of a kind writer .

Genet's Querelle de Brest is a novel that could not have been written by an American at the time of its initial publication, and probably still couldn't be today. In 2002, the book's theories and implications are still radical, and go unnoticed by the world at large, which would rather look, it seems, at anything other than the issues raised here. Querelle de Brest distorts some truths, but sees and exposes most of those it touches upon accurately.

Genet's premise is that all male-to-male social interaction--however overtly innocent or benign--is in fact a semi-conscious game of dominance and subordination that leads, under the right set of circumstances, directly towards its secretly-cherished goal of homosexual submission, violence, or, and in extreme or frustrated cases, murder. According to Genet's rules, men's heterosexual impulses are merely an adaptation resulting from severe, socially-conditioned but also spontaneous repression of an ardent, instinctive homosexual desire. Caught between equally powerful forces of desire and repression all of their adult lives, most men exist in a twilight state of continual psychological ensnarement, says Genet.

The novel takes place in the anarchic French seaport town of Brest, a liminal space that is itself symbolically semi-conscious: neither quite land or quite sea, its wharfs, dockyards, ramparts and seawalls are perpetually fog-bound; an abandoned penitentiary, the 'ancient prison' of unconsciousness that fetters the all-male population, dominates the landscape. In this Dionysian environment of hard rules, hard bodies and hard organs, the lead characters-Georges Querelle, Lieutenant Seblon, Mario, and Gil--are nonetheless simultaneously fighting themselves and one another to both avoid and become the passive or 'feminine' sexual partner.

The book's characters are largely itinerant, uneducated, and probably illiterate sailors, dockers, petty thieves, informers, and pimps; the area police are barely distinguishable from the criminal element, and mirror their psychology exactly. For all of these men, every encounter with another male, however brief, represents a veiled but unavoidable challenge for situational control and mastery. Perfectly illustrating Camille Paglia's theory that 'men are really only men when other men say they are,' the novel's characters allow themselves a slow, languid, and continuous series of retreats and advances around one another, fist-fighting until bloody and waving their [behinds] slyly at one another in turn. They mark territory, strut for each other, tease, bluff, mock and intimidate who they can, and, though infrequently allowing their 'violent emotion' and 'metaphysical hatred' to break into consciousness, satisfy their sexual urges with one another through displacement, sublimation, intoxication, extortion, coercion, or, in Querelle's case, serial murder.

Querelle is a sailor, narcissist, sociopath, and serial killer; his victims are former accomplices he needs to silence, easy targets for robbery, and 'pederasts.' But murder, the ultimate act of transgression and show of force, is also the means by which Querelle attempts to hide from himself his constantly fluctuating and continually diminishing sense of fragile identity. His knowledge of the dead men he has killed and buried, and the wealth he has stolen and hidden, represent to him not-wholly convincing evidence of his masculine superiority. The murders also act as a substitution and sublimation of his sexual desire for other men, which he continually dismisses, mocks and projects, as do all the other characters. Regardless of their own actions, sexual relationships with one another or tender feelings towards those they have partnered themselves with (macho stallion and police officer Mario thinks to himself, as he is kissed and caressed by hero-worshiping Dédé, "He's powdering me with mimosa blossoms"), the 'faggot, fairy, or auntie' is always someone other than themselves, and perpetually in disgrace.

Querelle also kills in search of a greater guilt than the one he feels in response to his emotional and sexual longing for other men, and to strike out in some fashion at the thing he most loathes within himself and desires in others.

Lone female character and brothel owner Madam Lysiane carries on a long-standing affair with Querelle's identical twin, heterosexually-identified Robert. But she becomes confused and irritated after meeting bisexual doppelganger Querelle, in whom she perceives the raw sexual power and totality that Querelle constantly searches for within himself but never finds. Lysiane lives a hazy, uncertain, and languorous existence, the feminine principal that she embodies frustrated and all but made extinct by the homosexual cloud that hangs permanently over the town.

Why are all of the men active (Norbert), self-identified (Theo, Lieutenant Seblon), latent or repressed homosexuals? Is Querelle de Brest nothing but a sustained homosexual fantasy? Is there any truth in its premises?

As Camille Paglia has said, "Whenever social controls fail, homosexuality will out," something that's a familiar fact in prison life and the history of British public schools. In the absence of women, heterosexually-identified men turn to one another for sexual satisfaction and affection with remarkable ease and completeness. It's an easily observable fact that it is the most physically masculine and virile men who enter easily into bisexual affairs (especially those who are either adventurous, fun-loving, self-secure or highly-sexed), having nothing to risk in terms of their masculine reputations by doing so, so unquestionable is their status as men in the eyes of other men. Like the cast of characters in Querelle, all they need is a pretext, a little shrewd knowledge of psychological game playing, and a quick tongue to obtain their ends.

Querelle de Brest is greatly slanted in favor of homosexuality, but beneath its surprisingly warm, human surface a paean to bisexuality--the natural key that could free men from the trap of their ensnarement and allow for emotional love among men as well as sexual freedom--can be sensed.

Having read, and hated, _Funeral Rites_ a few years ago, I approached _Querelle_ with diminished expectations. I was quite unprepared for its lyrical prose and complex characterization. Some of the passages from Seblon's journal flow better than any I've read in English, and Genet's metaphorical imagery is often surprising yet apt.

I often found myself reminded of my favorite novelist, Dostoevsky, while reading _Querelle_, not only for the redolent, foggy atmosphere but for the extended meditation on evil. While Dostoevsky's works concerned themselves with redemption from evil, however, in many ways Genet writes about evil (or at least criminality) as itself redemptive in some way--that is, when he isn't calling the very notion of redemption itself into question as a liberal humanist fantasy.

But what I like the most about this book is not its intellectuality, though there's plenty of that. I most enjoyed how his characters--unbelievably, even uninimaginably bizarre--became in his hands almost commonplace and real. Like Toni Morrison in a different, evil register, Genet's cast is quirky and out-there yet, somehow, not odd at all. Through their very strangeness they become the best exemplars of our real selves.

Genet's masterpiece is an upside down world of reverse values. Meeting Querelle through these pages is like meeting a seducing demon. His impact on nearly everyone is upheavel and disarray. He reminds the characters around him of their own shames and weaknesses, simply by being himself. Querelle is s fiendish mirror for human frailties, vanities, faults and weaknesses. Querelle's completeion is his domination by others. His peace is in full submission, his irony: those around are desparate to be possesed and dominated by him. His only friendly advances are thwarted by his passivity. A vision of a void and desparately empty character searching for the punishment he so richly deserves. If you don't understand the text , or the possibilities in the message, read Funeral Rights, or Miracle of the Rose, or better many Genet novels, his genius is deep and broad and always thought provoking.