One of the great works of twentieth century literature. Does anyone know why the Bernard Frechtman translation is abridged, omitting crucial scenes? I have the Black Cat press version, published '69, maybe the Grove Press rectifies the wrong.Genet's life project was to lift the poisionous veil of bourgeois/religious values from sexual love, in some of the most lyrical passages ever written in French prose. Most of this book is a series of sexual encounters between French resistance fighters, Nazis, and Genet himself, whose contempt for French society allows a curiously apolitical view of the historical events depicted. Genet mourns his fallen soldiers by writing himself through a series of violent sex dreams, resurrecting the dead on both sides of the barracades in an attempt to exorcise the trauma of his own long incarceration. It is impossible not to be horrified and equally impossible to reject Genet for reasons of immorality, although I suppose to most 21st century readers are too glib and detached and politically correct to experience in any way the power of this difficult novel.
Mourning is the gesture of recognition to the collapse of a lesser solar system. Genet is a shape shifter and this novel is a map of those people affected by, or related to the death of his lover. In order to cope with his grief, he imagines the interiors of the cast of souls related to the departed, among them the executioner, in Nazi occupied France. Genet veers from perspective to perspective, unannounced, desperately searching for a form or a logic of behavior where there has been left a void. Like a series of mirrors the novel folds and unfolds. Tying himself to every element, he suggests the possibility for empathy through narcissism. By seeing his own face in the faces of his lover, his lover's executioner, the soldiers lying quietly on the roofs of Paris, he is able to possess them.
Do You like book Funeral Rites (1994)?
It's difficult to describe the experiece of reading this text. It's so imaginatively rich, so personally intense and oddly, considering the subject matter, sincere. It seems to me that he takes high Baroque Catholic sentiment and uses it to describe things that no-one is supposed to describe because the experiences are deemed to be outside of "normal" moral behaviour. Yet he manages to transcend the disgust attached to these experiences and produces a prose of luminous beauty. The translation at times is a bit too much like 1930's American gangster films when it tries to convey Genet's use of slang, but no matter - the book is so unique, so exquisite, that it really has a soul of it's own.
—carelessdestiny
A friend of mine called Jean Genet "a dirty little Frenchman" and although he's so much more it's an incredibly good description of him. This is a long lament for Jean's lover who was killed in German occupied France during WWII. This was Genet's last novel and is a brutal, erotic, and disturbing look at the Resistance movement in Paris. It explores the themes of sex and death tirelessly and the thin line between love and hate. Gender and political lines are blurred in the relationships and buggery carried on by soldiers and fighters in the resistance. This book might certainly be triggering for many.
—Patrice
