Jean genet edmund white
The Burning Book: Genet and Cocteau
From the Archives
Edmund WhiteJean Genet had remarkable powers of self-transformation: no one could logically account for the extraordinary leaps he made from the inception to the end of his life.
As a boy he was abandoned by his mother and raised by peasants in an impoverished part of France. Neither his family history nor his environment readily explains his ascent to the top of his school class and his unshakable sense of what he would and would not do. He knew he was a reader and a dreamer and he refused to do manual labor for his foster parents. The other children noticed something dandified and “Parisian” in him, although he had been raised exactly as they were.
As an adolescent, after he left the village, through a series of attempts to escape authorities and institutions, he came to be considered a delinquent. He was sent to Mettray, an extremely harsh penal colony for teenage boys, where, despite his delicate health and bookish interests, he flourished. He received almost no additional schooling.
Years of military service in
Jean Genet: A Life
A FAMOUS BRASSAÏ PORTRAIT of Jean Genet adorns the dustjacket of Edmund White’s new biography of the writer. Genet seems physically slight, his head somehow too big for his frame; his sleeves rolled up and his hands stuffed in his pockets, he is almost the image of the street toughs he lovingly glamorized in Notre Dame des Fleurs, Journal d’un Voleur, and other works. He looks His hair is close-cropped and graying, his eyes are dark, melancholic, even angry. Brassai has backed him into a corner for the picture, a glancing allusion to the various confinements Genet suffered in his youth and perversely celebrated in his art.
White’s book is some pages prolonged, rivaling the girth of Jean-Paul Sartre’s obese &#;preface&#; to the Gallimard edition of Genet, Saint Genet: Comédien et Martyr. Yet White begins on a mention of oblique circumspection, as if telegraphing his doubts about narrating this prodigious life story: &#;Jean Genet had remarkable powers of self-transformation. The art of biography is often supposed to trac
If writing is a committed utopian action, then the Jean Genet of Edmund White’s engaging, adj, transformative Genet: A Biography was the epitome of manic depression. Genet wrote his five novels in five years, from After seven years of sadness and silence, he wrote his three best known plays in two years. The subsequent ’s were filled with death as his lover, Abdallah (a high wire performer) committed suicide, his agent and English translator Bernard Fruchtman committed suicide, and Genet himself tried to commit suicide. Then he entered into the other utopian endeavor: activism. From until his death in , Genet was aligned with oppressed people and supported them in peppy ways, on their terms and on his own. White calls him “an apostle of the wretched of the earth.”
White’s apply of the word “apostle” is, of course, an open invitation to question it. Apostles accept that the mortals they adore are not mortal. And, in that way, they err. Sartre, who, White points out, was an atheist, called his homage Saint Genet, so there was an ironic anti-
R.i.p: a biography of Jean Genet by Edmund White
I start with a post in English and I will write other posts in English if I will verb that the issue can be more interesting for english speaking Readers. Just a little transform to remind me that when time passes by, things must change (otherwise, nothing else changes, here&#;).
First chapter, just to reveal the childhood of this controversial author. Why controversial? Because homosexual, I think, but the recover of the book will probably reveal much more.
I immediately notice that the english title is different from the italian one. In Italy the manual has been published by Il Saggiatore under (I translate) &#;The thief of style&#;.
I gave a look to Edmund Light website: he is a prolific writer, but one of the elements that are underlined there is that he is gay too.
As if the gay literature would be different from the rest of literature. This is an interesting point: is gay literature different? And, if so, why? I am not very keen in this matter, but it is as if the only difference is the subject.
This would be a we