Books by Jean Genet

Den unge franskmand Jean vagabonderer rundt i 1930’ernes Europa på jagt efter eventyr. Han ernærer sig som tyv og trækkerdreng og elsker ufølsomme, barske elskere. For ham er de som blomster, smukke og skrøbelige. Drevet af sin kærlighed til det onde rejser Jean fra land til land – ind og ud af fængsler, fra elsker til elsker. På gaden i Barcelona møder han den enarmede alfons Stilitano, som er en sjover uden lige og vidunderligt forræderisk. Det er kærlighed ved første blik. Tyvens dagbog er en poetisk og løssluppen skildring af tilværelsen som udskud i Europas underverden. Jean Genets autofiktive roman om begær og forbrydelse betragtes som et hovedværk i det 20. århundredes franske litteratur. Jean Genet (1910-1986) var kendt og berygtet for sine autofiktive romaner om homoseksualitet, vold og erotik. Tyvens dagbog udkom i 1949 og skildrer Genets unge år på Europas landeveje. ”En af de stærkeste og mest vitale livsfortællinger, der nogensinde er skrevet” – The New York Post

Excerpts from the novels, plays, and poems of the French convict, prostitute, and literary artist join notes from his film, The Penal Colony, letters, essays, and a rare interview, all edited by a contemporary biographer.

This posthumous work brings together texts that bear witness to the many political causes and groups with which Genet felt an affinity, including May '68 and the treatment of immigrants in France, but especially the Black Panthers and the Palestinians. Genet speaks for a politics of protest, with an uncompromising outrage that, today, might seem on the verge of being forgotten.

Starting in 1970, Jean Genet—petty thief, prostitute, modernist master—spent two years in the Palestinian refugee camps in Jordan. Always an outcast himself, Genet was drawn to this displaced people, an attraction that was to prove as complicated for him as it was enduring. Prisoner of Love, written some ten years later, when many of the men Genet had known had been killed, and he himself was dying, is a beautifully observed description of that time and those men as well as a reaffirmation of the author's commitment not only to the Palestinian revolution but to rebellion itself. For Genet's most overtly political book is also his most personal—the last step in the unrepentantly sacrilegious pilgrimage first recorded in The Thief's Journal, and a searching meditation, packed with visions, ruses, and contradictions, on such life-and-death issues as the politics of the image and the seductive and treacherous character of identity. Genet's final masterpiece is a lyrical and philosophical voyage to the bloody intersection of oppression, terror, and desire at the heart of the contemporary world.