Word: genet
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...first part of the book interweaves Genet's early years with excerpts from his highly autobiographical novels, creating a rich fabric of the facts and the fiction they gave rise to. The biography tracks Genet to Paris, where he became Cocteau's literary find, his "golden thug," and later, Sartre's "pet queer." White imbues even the most frequently told stories with a novel charm. His recreation of the De Beauvoir-Sartre headquarters at the Cafe Deux Magots is sardonic and affectionate, and the deliciously lengthy and opinionated portrait of Cocteau could stand on its own as a study...
White has structured the biography in two parts; a break occurs at the point when Genet the little-known outlaw became Genet the national treasure (who then had trouble finding anything to write about). White places the beginning of this dry spell in 1949. That was the year the French president, in response to a letter written by Sartre and Cocteau and signed by a slew of intellectuals, issued Genet a pardon for a possible life sentence. The pardon represented an official endorsement by the French government, its reigning man of letters and its most famous philosopher...
...Despite Genet's prolonged case of writer's block, the second half of the biography is no less exciting than the first. As his creative impulse gave out, Genet sought personal satisfaction in various political causes, eventually becoming involved with the Black Panthers and the PLO. His political concerns sparked his last period of concentrated literary output in the late 50s, when he produced his classic plays The Blacks, The Maids and The Screens...
...Genet offers disturbing insight into the connections between politics and psychology. White pinpoints the essentially private nature of Genet's political motivations. He was from his youth filled with such hatred for anything which smelled of "the establishment" that he identified with outsiders more because they were outsiders than out of any sense of fairness. This fact made him a dubious political ally; he announced once that he wouldn't support the Palestinians if they ever received a homeland, and was fond of saying, "I would like the world not to change so that I can be against the world...
...Genet's commitment to revolutionary ideology was weak, his rage at those in power--anywhere--was so intense that it occasionally shocked even those for whom he purported to speak. The first cast to perform the anti-colonial The Blacks in Paris was mostly made up of African immigrants. These cosmopolitan hyphenated Frenchmen, according to White, had some trouble working up the demonic rage he gave his characters. In handling incidents like these, thick with politics and personalities, White manages to deal with both and distort neither. He never loses track of Genet's peculiar psychology or the very real...