Word: genet
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Examining Jean Genet, petty thief and major writer...
...Jean Genet could be hard on his public. "I don't have readers," he once lamented, "but thousands of voyeurs." He might have added that it was he who raised the blinds and staged the spectacle -- a rabbity-looking thief rhapsodizing about transvestites and jailyard toughs. Not even the revered felons of French literary tradition, the poetes maudits from Villon to Rimbaud, had been so devoted to the triumvirate of personal virtues -- thievery, homosexuality and betrayal -- in Genet's great novels. First the French, then the world, couldn't tear their eyes away...
Edmund White's Genet: A Biography (Knopf; 728 pages; $35) faces the problem of any book that would take the measure of a writer who so resoundingly fictionalized his own life. How can mere truth compete? White comes to his subject with the advantages of a gay novelist (A Boy's Own Story, The Beautiful Room Is Empty) and the author of thoughtful reportage about gay life (States of Desire) -- both roles in which he would have confronted Genet's compelling and problematic example long before he came to him as a biographer. Suitably equipped, White connects the facts...
...tangle of paradoxes he pointed to. His chief delight was his own abjection. His notion of Utopia was a cellblock of masters and servants, preferably locked in a bear hug. He left little record of how his novels, written mostly in prison, developed. Though White doesn't penetrate all Genet's mysteries -- such as how a foster child who spent much of his adolescence in a reformatory became one of the supreme stylists in French literature -- he lays out clearly how Genet's gifts served each of the circles that took...
...Genet emerges as a difficult personality, to say the least. Politically irresponsible and personally prickly, he made his life a tribute to the virtues of treachery, deceit and inconsistency. This singularity is best expressed in his remark, "I had to work hard to betray my friends, but in the end it was worth it." White's book effectively presents the man expressed in that sentiment--the almost monastic attention to artistic craft, the lonely pride in being irreducibly different...