Click on the headline to link to a "Wikipedia" entry for the French writer and playwright Jean Genet's first novel, "Our Lady Of The Flowers".
Book Review
Our Lady Of The Flowers, Jean Genet, 1943
Recently, in reviewing the texts for some of the plays by French writer and playwright, Jean Genet, I wrote the following first two paragraphs that apply to an appreciation of his first novel, “Our Lady Of The Flowers”, as well:
“There was a time when I would read anything the playwright Jean Genet wrote, especially his plays. The reason? Well, for one thing, the political thing that has been the core of my existence since I was a kid, his relationship to the Black Panthers when they were being systematically lionized by the international white left as the “real” revolutionaries and systematically liquidated by the American state police apparatus that was hell-bend on putting every young black man with a black beret behind bars, or better, as with Fred Hampton, Mark Clark and long list of others, dead. Genet, as his somewhat autobiographical “Our Lady Of The Flowers” details came from deep within a white, French version of that same lumpen “street” milieu from which the Panthers were recruiting. Thus, kindred spirits.
That kindred “street” smart relationship, of course, was like catnip for a kid like me who came from that same American societal intersection, the place where the white lumpen thug elements meet the working poor. I knew the American prototype of Jean Genet, up close and personal, except, perhaps, for his own well-publicized homosexuality and that of others among the dock-side toughs that he hung around with. So I was ready for a literary man who was no stranger to life’s seamy side. His play “The Maids” was the first one I grabbed (and I believe the first of his plays that I saw performed).”
I also noted in a review of “The Maids” that, fortunately, by the time that I got around to reading (and seeing) then such seemingly avant-garde material I had shed my prissy Catholic ignorance about the great varieties of human sexual expression, for good and evil. Especially about the overt homosexuality and masturbatory fantasies that dominate the story line, a plot, moreover, set in prison and concerning the French version of those lumpen elements, from the Parisian streets and waterfront, that I mentioned above that I grew up around in the 1950s. This reading is not for everyone, as literature or as prod to sexual fantasy, but it certainly is in the great French tradition of literature down at the base of society. And certainly a kindred spirit to Celine’s novelistic approach. The problem for us is, as the short-loved Paris Commune of 1871 found out, this lumpen social layer, this human dust form the “shock troops” for the reaction when society slides into a revolutionary period. For now though, read this.
Book Review
Our Lady Of The Flowers, Jean Genet, 1943
Recently, in reviewing the texts for some of the plays by French writer and playwright, Jean Genet, I wrote the following first two paragraphs that apply to an appreciation of his first novel, “Our Lady Of The Flowers”, as well:
“There was a time when I would read anything the playwright Jean Genet wrote, especially his plays. The reason? Well, for one thing, the political thing that has been the core of my existence since I was a kid, his relationship to the Black Panthers when they were being systematically lionized by the international white left as the “real” revolutionaries and systematically liquidated by the American state police apparatus that was hell-bend on putting every young black man with a black beret behind bars, or better, as with Fred Hampton, Mark Clark and long list of others, dead. Genet, as his somewhat autobiographical “Our Lady Of The Flowers” details came from deep within a white, French version of that same lumpen “street” milieu from which the Panthers were recruiting. Thus, kindred spirits.
That kindred “street” smart relationship, of course, was like catnip for a kid like me who came from that same American societal intersection, the place where the white lumpen thug elements meet the working poor. I knew the American prototype of Jean Genet, up close and personal, except, perhaps, for his own well-publicized homosexuality and that of others among the dock-side toughs that he hung around with. So I was ready for a literary man who was no stranger to life’s seamy side. His play “The Maids” was the first one I grabbed (and I believe the first of his plays that I saw performed).”
I also noted in a review of “The Maids” that, fortunately, by the time that I got around to reading (and seeing) then such seemingly avant-garde material I had shed my prissy Catholic ignorance about the great varieties of human sexual expression, for good and evil. Especially about the overt homosexuality and masturbatory fantasies that dominate the story line, a plot, moreover, set in prison and concerning the French version of those lumpen elements, from the Parisian streets and waterfront, that I mentioned above that I grew up around in the 1950s. This reading is not for everyone, as literature or as prod to sexual fantasy, but it certainly is in the great French tradition of literature down at the base of society. And certainly a kindred spirit to Celine’s novelistic approach. The problem for us is, as the short-loved Paris Commune of 1871 found out, this lumpen social layer, this human dust form the “shock troops” for the reaction when society slides into a revolutionary period. For now though, read this.
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