Edmond genet biography books
The definitive biography of Jean Genet, the incomparable French novelist whose works echo with themes of violent hierarchies, rituals of power and powerlessness and human identities as roles to be traded and manipulated. From his birth in 1911 to his adoption by foster parents and his tumultuous life as a runaway, thief, beggar and prostitute, Genet had remarkable powers of self-transformation, ultimately turning the pain of his life into writings that attracted the attention of literary trend-setter Jean Cocteau. Genet's work covered an amazing amount of social, political and intellectual territory. By diving into that which was awkward, ugly and painful, he emerged with the truth, transforming himself and others with its beauty. White earned the 1993 National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography for this fine work.
In this massive biography White gets well inside the skin of the great French writer widely known for his sensational novels, Our Lady of the Flowers and A Thief's Journal (both written in the 1940s but not published in the U.S. until two decades later), and his plays, The Maids and The Blacks . White is a master at illuminating the connections between Genet's (1910-1986) life and creative output; as a novelist himself, White ( The Beautiful Room Is Empty ) offers brilliant insight into the way experience is transformed into art. His most vivid passages fill in crucial blanks often left by literary critics in search of the source and ultimate meaning of a writer's contributions. Also valuable is White's painstaking delineation of Genet's often unpopular political involvements--he supported the Black Panthers and later in his career the Palestinians--as well as his uneasy position among French intellectuals of the postwar period. White's frank and stylish account of Genet's erotic life is not for the squeamishly heterosexual, as those familiar with Genet's works (or White's for that matter) will know, for rarely have a writer's life and work been so erotically connected as Genet's. In a biography of this length, there are inevitably moments when the biographer's concentration appears to flag and events pile up with little analysis. Yet among the pleasures here is that White's prose largely matches the seductive allure of his subject's. Photos.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
French writer Jean Genet (1910-86) was a petty thief who produced some of the most revolutionary novels and plays of our time. White's massive biography illuminates the life and works of this "deeply contradictory man," although many events from his early years of vagabondage and prostitution are beyond retrieval. A greater mystery--which even White, an accomplished novelist ( A Boy's Own Story , LJ 9/1/82; The Beautiful Room Is Empty , LJ 3/1/88), cannot solve--is how someone of Genet's limited education could have produced a first novel of such magnitude as Our Lady of the Flowers ( LJ 11/1/63). (Parallels with the case of Shakespeare are not far-fetched.) This work is a labor of love and admiration. Essential for collections of modern literature. Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 6/15/93.
- Grove Koger, Boise P.L., Id.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Kirkus Reviews
An exhaustive and perhaps definitive biography of the celebrated French writer and thief (1910-86), who looks almost human through the eyes of the much tamer White (The Beautiful Room is Empty, 1988, etc.). It's to Genet's credit that, once he became famous enough to establish a public persona, he quite frankly assumed the role of a criminal outcast. The son of an unknown father and an impoverished mother, Genet was raised in a dreary succession of orphanages and foster homes. As a child, he showed signs of great intelligence and creativity, but, as a ward of the state, he couldn't be educated for anything other than manual labor. Incorrigible and fiercely independent, he turned to theft at an early age and spent most of his adolescent years in reform schools and prisons. It was during this period that he became conscious of his homosexuality; throughout the rest of his life, he tried to insulate himself in masculine societies that re-created the brutal and isolated asylums of his youth. ``Boiling over with contradictions, Genet was cruel and sensitive,'' says White, ``a moralist who stole from friends, a petty thief who forged copies of his own quite genuine masterpieces.'' Genet's early writings--Our Lady of the Flowers and The Miracle of the Rose--brought him to the attention of Cocteau and the surrealists, but it was the patronage of Sartre that made Genet famous--and that brought him a pardon from the president of France. Ironically, Genet found it more difficult to write as a free man than as a prisoner, and, in his later years, he nearly stopped working altogether. He finally left France for Morocco (where he's buried) and took up the cause of the Palestinians. A thorough and painstaking job that, however, could have been accomplished in half the space. Scholars will find Genet essential; most others will find a lot to skim. (Useful notes; 16 pages of photographs--not seen) -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
Review
'Dazzling. Genet has found a scrupulous, meticulous chronicler in Edmund White.' -- Philip Henscher, The Guardian
'An absorbing and magisterial biography...a labor of love in every sense. A comparable achievement [is] Richard Ellmann's biography of Oscar Wilde.'
-- John Bayley, The Evening Standard
'Elegant, meticulous and wholly satisfying.'
-- Brian Masters, The Sunday telegraph
'White has caught the uncatchable man -- the public Genet as well as the recluse: no better praise can be given a biographer.'
-- Paul Bailey, The Daily Telegraph
From the Inside Flap
Moving from Genet's illegitimate birth in 1910 to his foster childhood in a farming village in central France, Edmund White explores the early milieu that transformed an inherently theatrical child into a petty criminal and prodigiously original writer, whose most startling creation may have been his invention of himself. Accused of stealing and running away, Genet was sent to reform school at Mettray, where his imagination flourished under the spell of an all-male communal life and his first homosexual experiences. In the 1930s, he deserted from the army and travelled in Europe as a vagabond, prostitute and thief, always on the lam from the police and the military. In 1942, he emerged from one of several prison stays with the first of his remarkable novels, Our Lady of the Flowers. It was admired by Cocteau, who undertook to get it published and interceded with the French authorities to keep its author out of prison. White shows us how Cocteau thrust the 'marvelous, mysterious, intolerable' Genet into the heart of literary Paris, where he enjoyed a curious celebrity as great writer and petty thief, was painted by Giacometti (from whom he stole) and was canonized by Sartre in his monumental study, Saint Genet.
By 1948, Genet had produced five highly original novels. In the mid-1950s, after several years of debilitating depression, he turned to the writing of plays, of which The Balcony, The Blacks and The Screens were immediately hailed as masterpieces. Despite his ambivalence about political movements, he supported the Paris student uprising in 1968 and turned up -- as a journalist -- at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. In 1970, he became a spokesman for the Black Panthers, but in his last decade he immersed himself -- politically and aesthetically -- in the Arab world, championing the struggle for a Palestinian homeland and writing his last, posthumously published book, Prisoner of Love.
Edmund White explores the perverse extremes of Genet's life and separates the facts from the mythology that Genet himself fashioned. Drawing on interviews with Genet's friends, lovers, publishers and acquaintances, and using new material from correspondence, journals, police records, psychiatric reports and other original sources, White reveals a life animated by contradictory impulses: authenticity and dissembling, fidelity and flirtation, domination and submission, honor and betrayal. Throughout, he brilliantly interprets and appraises Genet's astonishing oeuvre, reading the fiction with the focussed attention of a novelist and opening up the dense invention of the plays. His masterful and intuitive biography fully illuminates a hitherto enigmatic literary genius.
From the Back Cover
'An absorbing and magisterial biography...a labor of love in every sense. A comparable achievement [is] Richard Ellmann's biography of Oscar Wilde.'
-- John Bayley, The Evening Standard
'Elegant, meticulous and wholly satisfying.'
-- Brian Masters, The Sunday telegraph
'White has caught the uncatchable man -- the public Genet as well as the recluse: no better praise can be given a biographer.'
-- Paul Bailey, The Daily Telegraph
About the Author
Edmund White was born in Cincinnati in 1940. His previous books include Forgetting Elena, Nocturnes for the King of Naples, States of Desire: Travels in Gay America, A Boy's Own Story, Caracole and The Beautiful Room Is Empty. He lives in Paris.
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