Dominique Edde - Böcker

Now in paperback, The Crime of Jean Genet is a powerful personal account of the influence of one writer on another and one of the most penetrating explorations yet of Genet’s work and achievement.Dominique Eddé met novelist and playwright Jean Genet in the 1970s. And she never forgot him. “His presence,” she writes, “gave me the sensation of icy fire. Like his words, his gestures were full, calculated, and precise. . . . Genet’s movements mimicked the movement of time, accumulating rather than passing.”This book is Eddé’s account of that meeting and its ripples through her years of engaging with Genet’s life and work. Rooted in personal reminiscences, it is nonetheless much broader, offering a subtle analysis of Genet’s work and teasing out largely unconsidered themes, like the absence of the father, which becomes a metaphor for Genet’s perpetual attack on the law. Tying Genet to Dostoevsky through their shared fascination with crime, Eddé helps us more clearly understand Genet’s relationship to France and Palestine, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, the theater, and even death.  A powerful personal account of the influence of one writer on another, The Crime of Jean Genet is also one of the most penetrating explorations yet of Genet’s work and achievement.

Rich and multilayered, with elements of both memoir and fiction, Dominique Eddé’s Kite defies categorization. Beginning in the 1960s and ending in the late ’80s, it is at once a narrative of a passionate, and ultimately tragic, relationship between Mali and Farid and the simultaneous decline of Egyptian-Lebanese society. Densely populated with myriad characters, Kite chronicles the casualties of social conventions, religious divisions and cultural clichés. The differences between East and West are central to the tension of Eddé’s book and share the responsibility for an unavoidable impasse between the lovers. This fragmented narrative—written in several voices that reflect the fragmented lives of those caught up in the madness of war—calls into question an entire way of living and thinking. In lyrical, elegant, original, and often startling prose, Eddé weaves together multiple strands—meditating on the nature of language, investigating the concept of the novel, and powerfully depicting the experience of being blind. Deftly evoking the intellectual scene of Beirut in the ’60s, Lebanon’s mountainscapes, and the urban settings of Cairo, Paris, and London, Kite probes memory with a curious mix of irony and melancholy, ending up in a place beyond hope and despair.

Now in paperback, The Crime of Jean Genet is a powerful personal account of the influence of one writer on another and one of the most penetrating explorations yet of Genet’s work and achievement.Dominique Eddé met novelist and playwright Jean Genet in the 1970s. And she never forgot him. “His presence,” she writes, “gave me the sensation of icy fire. Like his words, his gestures were full, calculated, and precise. . . . Genet’s movements mimicked the movement of time, accumulating rather than passing.”This book is Eddé’s account of that meeting and its ripples through her years of engaging with Genet’s life and work. Rooted in personal reminiscences, it is nonetheless much broader, offering a subtle analysis of Genet’s work and teasing out largely unconsidered themes, like the absence of the father, which becomes a metaphor for Genet’s perpetual attack on the law. Tying Genet to Dostoevsky through their shared fascination with crime, Eddé helps us more clearly understand Genet’s relationship to France and Palestine, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, the theater, and even death.  A powerful personal account of the influence of one writer on another, The Crime of Jean Genet is also one of the most penetrating explorations yet of Genet’s work and achievement.