Word: genet
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...friends. One of the problems in writing the biography is that every time I met somebody it was somebody who was wounded by him. So you had to overcome that before they'd open up and talk about their feelings...I've made a few friends out of the Genet crowd. Mostly his friends I found rather somber people. I think he went for a certain kind of Stalinist-leaning leftist intellectual that isn't exactly my idea of a barrelfull of laughs...
Somebody like Genet, I feel, is basically irrecuperable; you can't co-opt, you can't normalize, recuperate him. There's this biography and he exists in Gallimard's Ouvre Complete, all that stuff, but the truth is that people in the provinces still don't buy Genet, he'll never be taught in schools. Bourgeois women, who are most readers, can't read him or don't want to. I think it's really always going to remain like that. There's no way he's going to ever really fit in. I don't think my works...
...Genet: A Biography...
Perhaps more than any other writer of this century, Jean Genet celebrated what made him an outsider. An orphan, a homosexual, a thief and a prostitute, he spent the first half of his life in and out of jail. Genet gladly embraced society's definition of his sexuality as perverse, and then perversely glorified oppressive all-male environments: prison, brutal reform schools and the SS all received romanticized treatment in such landmark novels as Our Lady of Flowers and The Thief's Journal. What Genet lacked in moral acuity he made up for in artistic originality. His novels dealt with...
This fascinating figure is the subject of a meticulously researched and elegantly written biography by Edmund White. Despite Genet's mammoth size and its tendency to wander from its subject, the book is never boring. White simply writes too well to let our attention stray. His sidetrips are always rewarding and his sense of his subject's life and literature compelling throughout...