Genet's masterpiece.
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'Our Lady of the Flowers' is the best novel by Jean Genet- a victim of the intolerant French prison system (not unlike 'three strikes & you're out in the USA). Allusions are drawn to another French writer, famously incarcerated: the Marquis de Sade. This only goes so far- true that both '120 Days of Sodom' & 'Our Lady of the Flowers' were written in prison. And early drafts were destroyed or withdrawn... But Genet was more modern than de Sade (obviously)- here he writes about the senses- a theme common to modernist works such as 'Tropic of Cancer' & 'Ulysses'. Though I feel his closest literary relations are Ferdinand Celine: the Vichy-collaborator & William S. Burroughs. His influence can be detected in the more erotic elements of JG Ballard- notably 'Crash'...In this novel, which has a thoughtful foreword by Jean Paul Sartre, Genet takes us to the internal abyss he occupies. And describes how he transcends this to make it a heaven... but it is taken to a level of Holy praise...This is probably Genet's masterpiece- though 'Miracle of the Rose' & 'Querelle of Brest' are close. I don't think you have to possess homosexual inclinations to get something out of this book...As with writers like Charles Bukowski & Hubert Selby Jr. Genet is a self-educated man from 'the other side of life' (to quote from 'Journey to the End of the NIght'). Unlike Sade he was not from the upper-classes, nor was he from the middle-class; he was from the streets. Almost a prefigured character for a Jacques Brel song. As the foreword tells you, the French Existentialists (Sartre et al) who would later turn obliquely Marxist, campaigned to have Genet released. And this is the end product of that. It is also one of the finest fictions of the 20th Century.
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