Jean Genet – författare

»Genets vackraste bok.« | JEAN-PAUL SARTRE»Bara en handfull 1900-talsförfattare, som Kafka och Proust, har en lika viktig, lika auktoritär, lika oåterkallelig röst och stil.« | SUSAN SONTAGSom tjuv, tiggare och homosexuell prostituerad flackar Jean Genet runt i trettiotalets Europa. I Spanien, Italien, Österrike, Belgien, dåvarande Tjeckoslovakien, Polen och Nazi-Tyskland. På kaféer, barer och spelhålor. På brottsplatser och i fängelser. Den erfarenheten blir till grund för en berättande poesi av ett slag som ingen skådat, varken förr eller senare.Tjuvens dagbok [1949] är Genets mest öppet självbiografiska roman och den tydligaste manifestationen av hans världsbild. Fantasier som river upp Västerlandets djupast rotade normer, när kristendomens språk approprieras och brottslingen helgonförklaras.En av världslitteraturens mest originella bekännelseromaner, i översättning av Bengt Söderbergh & Marc Ribes och med ett nyskrivet förord av författaren Torbjörn Elensky.JEAN GENET [1910 -1986] var en fransk romanförfattare, dramatiker, poet och essäist. Vid sidan av sitt författarskap var han politisk aktivist och stödde den algeriska befrielserörelsen, vistades i månader i palestinskt flyktingläger i Jordanien, samt besökte Svarta pantrarna i USA.»Genet skapar en egen värld som ofta översvämmas av en brinnande skönhet. En mörkt högtidlig glans som inte mycket i den moderna litteraturen kan tävla med.« | BENGT HOLMQVIST

I Rosenmiraklet [1946] återger Jean Genet sina erfarenheter inifrån franska fängelser på tjugo-, trettio- och fyrtiotalen.Det blir mer en världsförklaring än en bekännelse. Den katolska moraliska ordning som Genet inpräntats sedan barnsben återkastas i en inverterad version, där en mördare dyrkas som ett helgon. Kedjorna på den dödsdömde mördaren och våldtäktsmannen Harcamone förvandlas till vita rosor inför berättarens hänförda blick.De brutala övergreppen på ungdomsanstalten i Mettray minns Genet i ett paradisiskt ljus, medan fängelset Fontevrault alltid var den helgedom mot vilken hans barndomsdrömmar steg upp.Genets till stor del självbiografiska roman kastar inte bara om alla moraliska värden, den hör också till de mest fysiska och sensuella kärleksdiktningarna i världslitteraturen. I översättning av Bengt Söderbergh och Marc Ribes, med ett nyskrivet förord av Bo I. Cavefors.»Genet skapar en egen värld som ofta översvämmas av en brinnande skönhet. En mörkt högtidlig glans som inte mycket i den moderna litteraturen kan tävla med.«BENGT HOLMQVIST»Genet skulle ha förtjänat internationellt anseende enbart för Rosenmiraklet. Han lyckas till en häpnadsväckande grad skapa poesi av den djupaste förnedring.«THE TIMES»Genet var utan tvivel en av det här århundradets största franska prosapoeter, på samma nivå som Proust och Céline.«LE MATIN

Querelle landstiger i Brest, vars dimmiga hamnkvarter befolkas av sjömän, hamnarbetare, poliser och prostituerade.Querelle, själv matros, tjuv, opiumsmugglare, prostituerad och seriemördare, begår ett mord som för honom innebär både en förbannelse och en befrielse; det utplånar honom som moralisk varelse i denna värld. När ett annat mord begås i hamnkvarteren, ser Querelle chansen att undkomma lagen. Det blir samtidigt hans ultimata förnedring, eftersom han kommer att förråda den han älskar.Inte undra på att Matrosen och stjärnan väckte skandal i Frankrike när den kom 1947. Bara ett par år efter befrielsen från nazistregimen glorifierar romanen förräderiet. Det var så Jean Genet hanterade det mordiska hos människan: genom att dyrka det. På så vis både upplyste och levandegjorde han ett moraliskt gränsterritorium.I översättning av Nils Kjellström och med ett nyskrivet förord av Helena Eriksson.»Genet skapar en egen värld som ofta översvämmas av en brinnande skönhet. En mörkt högtidlig glans som inte mycket i den moderna litteraturen kan tävla med.«BENGT HOLMQVIST»Bara en handfull 1900-talsförfattare, som Kafka och Proust, har en lika viktig, lika auktoritär, lika oåterkallelig röst och stil.«SUSAN SONTAG»Sin generations mest originella och provokativa författare.«THE TIMES»Genet var utan tvivel en av det här århundradets största franska prosapoeter, på samma nivå som Proust och Céline.«LE MATIN»Genet tar det latenta hotet i sexualiteten på allvar, och drar med oss in i en konfrontation med de lägsta av änglar.« HARPER'S BAZAAR

Jean Genet, French playwright, novelist and poet, turned the experiences in his life amongst pimps, whores, thugs and other fellow social outcasts into a poetic literature, with an honesty and explicitness unprecedented at the time. Widely considered an outstanding and unique figure in French literature, Genet wrote five novels between 1942 and 1947, now being republished by Faber & Faber in beautiful new paperback editions.The Thief's Journal is perhaps Jean Genet's most authentically autobiographical novel; an account of his impoverished travels across 1930s Europe. The narrator is guilty of vagrancy, petty theft and prostitution, but his writing transforms such degradations into an inverted moral code, where criminality and delinquency become heroic. With a holy trinity of his own making - homosexuality, theft and betrayal - in The Thief's Journal Genet produced a startlingly powerful novel without precedent.Includes a new introduction by Ahdaf Soueif.

Jean Genet, French playwright, novelist and poet, turned the experiences in his life amongst pimps, whores, thugs and other fellow social outcasts into a poetic literature, with an honesty and explicitness unprecedented at the time. Widely considered an outstanding and unique figure in French literature, Genet wrote five novels between 1942 and 1947, now being republished by Faber & Faber in beautiful new paperback editions.Jean Genet began to write his third novel in 1943, but it was to be changed utterly by the death of Jean Decarnin. Genet's sensual and brutal portrait of the Second World War unfolds between the poles of his grief for his lover Jean, killed in the Resistance during the liberation of Paris, and his perverse attraction to the collaborator Riton. Powerfully written, and with moments of great poetic subtlety, Funeral Rites is a dark meditation on the mirror images of love and hate, sex and death. Includes a new introduction by Neil Bartlett.

Jean Genet's The Balcony, which premiered in 1957, is acknowledged as one of the founding plays of modern theatre: philosopher Lucien Goldmann dubbed it 'the first great Brechtian play in French literature'.In a brothel of an unnamed French city the madam, Irma, directs a series of fantastical scenarios - a bishop forgives a penitent, a judge punishes a thief, a general rides astride his horse. Outside, an uprising threatens to engulf the streets. The patrons of the brothel wait anxiously for the chief of police to arrive, but in his place comes the queen's envoy to inform the assembled that the figureheads of the establishment have been killed in the uprising. Play-acting turns to reality as the patrons don their costumes in public in an attempt to quell the insurrection.Illusion and reality, order and dissolution - these are the grand themes of The Balcony.

The Screens was the last of Genet's plays to be performed during his lifetime. Its subject is the Algerian War of Independence, and it is an intricately crafted, grandiose construction - beguiling and baffling in equal measure.While the most openly political of Genet's plays, the work is not revolutionary in intent. Rather, as the play progresses the radical direction of lighting and the use of folding canvases serve to segment and compartmentalise the drama, and in so doing they transform the extremities of war into a series of incantatory scenes, vital and ritualistic, that bring stability to an otherwise unbearable reality.'The greatness of [The Screens], in all its lurid and unremitting, often comic theatricality, is its deliberate and logical dismantling not just of French identity-France as empire, as power, as history-but of the very notion of identity itself.' Edward Said, Grand Street

Splendid's, a two-act police thriller written in 1948, was never staged in Jean Genet's lifetime. In 1952 he announced that he had destroyed the manuscript, and the play was assumed lost. Only in 1993 did a surviving copy reappear.Exhausted, unshaven and wearing evening dress, Genet's gangsters never let go of their machine-guns - not even when they dance together. Their conversations contain some of Genet's finest dialogue; an insane mixture of melodramatic speech-making and low-camp bickering, all wrapped up in a sexy pastiche of forties American film noir, lurching stylishly from tough realism into wicked black humour.Translated by writer, performer and director Neil Bartlett, this volume also contains an introduction by Genet's biographer, Edmund White.

The Maids (Les Bonnes, here translated by Bernard Frechtman) is Jean Genet's most oft-revived work for the stage. First performed in Paris in 1947, its action was inspired by a real-life scandal, the murder by two maids, sisters Christine and Léa Papin, of their mistress and her daughter. Genet's maids - Solange and Claire - occupy themselves, whenever their Madame is out of doors, by acting out ritualised fantasies of revenging their downtrodden status. But when the game goes beyond their control the maids are compelled to try to make their fantasy a reality.'The most extraordinary example of the whirligigs of being and appearance, of the imaginary and the real, is to be found in [Genet's] The Maids. It is the element of fake, of sham, of artificiality, that attracts Genet in the theatre.' Jean-Paul Sartre

'One evening,' wrote Jean Genet in a prefatory note to The Blacks (1959), 'an actor asked me to write a play for an all-black cast. But what exactly is a black? First of all, what's his colour?'Stereotyping, masking and clowning would be the tools with which Genet dissected settled ideas of race and identity in this, one of his most successful (and controversial) works for the stage.'In form, [The Blacks] flows as freely as an improvisation, with fantasy, allegory and intimations of reality mingled into a weird, stirring unity... Genet's investigation of the color black begins where most plays of this burning theme leave off.' New York Times

The 1966 staging in Paris of Jean Genet's The Screens by the Jean-Louis Barrault-Madeleine Renaud Company was highly controversial. Written at the height of the Algerian War, it was initially considered un-performable in France due to the violent political reactions it was bound to arouse. The Barrault-Renaud production was directed by the venerable Roger Blin, and during the several months of rehearsals that Genet attended he wrote a series of letters and notes to Blin giving his views on every aspect of the staging. His comments deal with the details of that play and that production, but also transcend them, amounting to a precise and fascinating compilation of Jean Genet's concept of the theatre.This volume also contains two essays by Genet, originally published in the French periodical Un Tel, giving his striking and highly personal views on life and art.

Three young convicts share a cell. Locked into a world of dangerous rivalries, criminals Lefranc and Maurice compete for the attention of the charismatic condemned man, Green-Eyes.Informed by his own experience in French prisons, Jean Genet's first play, Deathwatch is an explosive exploration of the inversion of moral order.Genet was one of the most prominent and provocative writers of the twentieth century.Jean Genet's Deathwatch premiered in this translation by David Rudkin with the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1987 and was revived at the Print Room, London, in April 2016.

A beautiful new edition of Jean Genet's classic work, which includes a new introduction by Jon Savage.'One of the great writers of our times.' Sunday TelegraphQuerelle, a young sailor at large in the port of Brest, is an object of illicit desire to his diary-keeping superior officer, Lieutenant Seblon. He is coveted, too, by a corrupt policeman, Mario, and gives himself freely both to brothel-keeper Madame Lysiane and to her husband. But Querelle is a thief and a murderer - not a man to be trusted or trifled with.

'A beautifully written, dreamlike book . . . A true outlaw artist.' Bobby Gillespie, The TimesOur Lady of the Flowers, often considered Genet's masterpiece, was written in the cell of a French prison where he was being held for theft. Here is the darker side of Montmartre, a world of pimps, thieves, prostitutes, queens and blackmailers, where 'morality' in the common sense of the word has no meaning. The story of Divine, a drag-queen prostitute, is interwoven with that of one of his lovers, a young man due to be arrested for murder. A story of sex, crime and death, Our Lady of the Flowers is a powerful and original debut novel, which put Genet into the front rank of French writers.

Jean Genet, French playwright, novelist and poet, turned the experiences in his life amongst pimps, whores, thugs and other fellow social outcasts into a poetic literature, with an honesty and explicitness unprecedented at the time. Widely considered an outstanding and unique figure in French literature, Genet wrote five novels between 1942 and 1947, now being republished by Faber & Faber in beautiful new paperback editions.Miracle of the Rose was Jean Genet's second novel, composed in 1943 while incarcerated in prison. The novel is informed by Genet's memories of confinement, both in prison and the Mettray reformatory where he spent three years from the age of 15. The central figure of the novel is Harcamone, whom Genet first encountered at Mettray, and who resurfaces in an adult prison -- now a murderer and, in the world-turned-upside-down of Genet's vision, a quasi-divine figure.Includes a new introduction by Terry Hands.

This posthumous work brings together articles, interviews, statements, prefaces, manifestos, and speeches dating from 1964 to 1985 (just before Genet's death in 1986). These texts 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. We follow him from the Chicago Democratic Convention (where he met William Burroughs and Alan Ginsberg) to Yale University, where he gave the famous May Day Speech in support of the Black Panthers, to Jordan and the Palestinian camps. Along the way, Genet finds allies (George Jackson, Angela Davis, Leyla Shahid, Tahar Ben Jelloun). And, of course, enemies.Between passionate enmity and passionate affinity, Genet speaks for a politics of protest, with an uncompromising outrage that, today, might seem on the verge of being forgotten.The texts are accompanied by detailed editorial notes.