'Our Lady of the Flowers', which is often considered to be Genet's masterpiece, was written entirely in the solitude of a prison cell. the exceptional value of the work lies in its ambiguity.
Our Lady of the Flowers
and over one million other books are available for Amazon Kindle. Learn more
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Browse the best books of summer including blockbusters, beach reads, and editors' picks in our Summer Reading Store. |
Book Description
Frequently Bought Together
Editorial Reviews
Review
Novel by Jean Genet, written while he was in prison for burglary and published in 1944 in French as Notre-Dame des fleurs. The novel and the author were championed by many contemporary writers, including Jean-Paul Sartre and Jean Cocteau, who helped engineer a pardon for Genet. A wildly imaginative fantasy of the Parisian underworld, the novel tells the story of Divine, a male prostitute who consorts with thieves, pimps, murderers, and other criminals and who has many sexual adventures. Written in lyrical, dreamlike prose, the novel affirms a new moral order, one in which criminals are saints, evil is glorified, and conventional taboos are freely violated. -- The Merriam-Webster Encyclopedia of Literature
Language Notes
Text: English, French (translation)
Product Details
Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images? |
More About the Authors
Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.
Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
77 of 84 people found the following review helpful
By J. E. Barnes
Format:Paperback
Jean Genet's seminal 'Our Lady Of The Flowers' (1943) is generally considered to be his greatest novel by establishment critics, probably because it was his first.
The first draft was written while Genet was incarcerated in a French prison; when the manuscript was discovered and destroyed by officials, Genet, still a prisoner, immediately set about writing it again. It isn't difficult to understand how and why Genet was able to reproduce the novel under such circumstances, because 'Our Lady Of The Flowers' is nothing less than a mythic recreation of Genet's past and then-present history.
Combining memories with facts, fantasies, speculations, irrational dreams, tender emotion, empathy, and philosophical insights, Genet probably made his isolation bearable by retreating into a world not only of his own making, but one over which he had total control.
The imprisoned narrator "Jean," who may or may not be identical with the author, masturbates regularly; like a perpetual motion machine, his fantasies fuel his writing and his writing spurs on his fantasies in turn.
Nothing illustrates this more than the brief scene in which self-sustaining "Jean" describes an act of auto-fellatio. "Jean" is not only the serpent that eats its tail but becomes a small, circular, self - imbibing universe all his own. A motto attributed to the alchemists could be the narrator's own: "Every man his own wife."
Though the narrative is not the primary focus of this or any of Genet's novels, most responsible critics have failed to remark on the fact that the narrative of 'Our Lady Of The Flowers' is the least compelling of any found in his five major novels. 'Our Lady Of The Flowers', does, however, lay the basic groundwork for the finer novels to come: 'The Miracle Of The Rose,' 'Funeral Rites,' 'Querelle,' and 'The Thief's Journal' (all written between 1944 and 1948).
While 'Our Lady Of The Flowers' is Genet's only novel to feature a predominantly effeminate homosexual man (Divine, who is at least partially a transvestite) as its protagonist ("Our Lady Of The Flowers," a virile young thug, is a secondary character), most of the other elements of the book will be very familiar to those who have read the balance of his fiction.
Transvestites and transvestite figures abound, as do handsome, amoral, and homosexual or bisexual "toughs," jokes and extended vignettes concerned with lice, flatulence, constipation, and feces, mordant examinations of manhood and the criminal's code of honor, obsession with personal power through emotional betrayal, the long vagabond road to "sainthood," theft, masochistic love, prostitution, and vivid examples of the way in which physical desire and sexuality secretly and subtly fuel, in Genet's view, almost every aspect of life.
As in portions of his other novels, the characters here, even the swaggering, virile young men, are known among their friends by fey pet names like "Darling Daintyfoot," "Mimosa," and "Our Lady of the Flowers," which are intended to be simultaneously affectionate and mocking.
To further confuse, Divine is referred to as a "he" and referred to his surname during his youth and as a "she" and "Divine" in maturity.
As in 'The Miracle of the Rose' and 'Funeral Rites,' characters mesh into one another, exchange identities, and move backward and forward through time at the narrator's whim.
Both "Jean" and the individual characters fuse their own and each other's personalities together as needed, and all occasionally lose control of this process: but Jean Genet, master puppeteer, never does.
Genet's readers are probably aware of the existence of haughty establishment critics who pretentiously embrace Genet's work but nonetheless treat it like something best held at the end of a very long stick.
"Evil" is the word most commonly used to describe Genet's fiction by anxious middlebrow critics who, while distressingly stimulated by his work, feel duty-bound to officially decry its potential for pernicious influence.
Many artists are said to create a "moral universe" within the body of their work; Genet is one of the few that actually does, though his is a mirror universe where amorality reigns.
Genet's world is so exclusively concerned with flea-ridden prostitutes, child murderers who don't wipe themselves, handsome pimps who eat what they scratch out of their noses, prostitutes with rotting teeth, strutting, uneducated alpha male hustlers, and masochistic sodomites--bourgeois emblems of horror all--that the question of "evil" as such in Genet's work becomes obsolete.
While Genet loves and personally glorifies his memories, fictional recreations and their outcast lifestyles, he never objectively condones their actions to his audience.
In all of his novels, Genet finds beauty, suffering, and vulnerability--humanity--in everyone, thus setting a far better example than his hypocritical reviewers.
There is as much "evil" in Genet's books as there is represented by any typical novel's reality principle (for example, all of Genet's characters reveal more humanity and innate dignity than the crass, vacuous crowd Nick Carraway falls in with in Fitzgerald's 'The Great Gatsby') or, for that matter, as there is in the lives of those unstable, morally-confused critics who are simply too cowardly to recognize the world as the diverse, dangerous, devouring, and unstable place that it is.
If 'Our Lady Of The Flowers' proves anything, it's that fifty years after its initial publication, the book is still effectively upsetting the wormy apple carts Genet intended it to.
From the standpoint of Jung's psychological types, Genet's feeling and sensation functions probably predominated in both his life and his writing.
However, his thinking and intuition functions were clearly constellated as well, giving 'Our Lady Of The Flowers' and the masterpieces that followed it unmatched macrocosmic perceptiveness, poetic resonance, and gripping, all-inclusive dramatic power.
Like alchemical "totality" the hermaphrodite, a shaman, or a legitimate Christian saint, mystic Genet seems to have written from a state of undifferentiated consciousness and enjoyed a state of perpetual participation mystique with life.
The first draft was written while Genet was incarcerated in a French prison; when the manuscript was discovered and destroyed by officials, Genet, still a prisoner, immediately set about writing it again. It isn't difficult to understand how and why Genet was able to reproduce the novel under such circumstances, because 'Our Lady Of The Flowers' is nothing less than a mythic recreation of Genet's past and then-present history.
Combining memories with facts, fantasies, speculations, irrational dreams, tender emotion, empathy, and philosophical insights, Genet probably made his isolation bearable by retreating into a world not only of his own making, but one over which he had total control.
The imprisoned narrator "Jean," who may or may not be identical with the author, masturbates regularly; like a perpetual motion machine, his fantasies fuel his writing and his writing spurs on his fantasies in turn.
Nothing illustrates this more than the brief scene in which self-sustaining "Jean" describes an act of auto-fellatio. "Jean" is not only the serpent that eats its tail but becomes a small, circular, self - imbibing universe all his own. A motto attributed to the alchemists could be the narrator's own: "Every man his own wife."
Though the narrative is not the primary focus of this or any of Genet's novels, most responsible critics have failed to remark on the fact that the narrative of 'Our Lady Of The Flowers' is the least compelling of any found in his five major novels. 'Our Lady Of The Flowers', does, however, lay the basic groundwork for the finer novels to come: 'The Miracle Of The Rose,' 'Funeral Rites,' 'Querelle,' and 'The Thief's Journal' (all written between 1944 and 1948).
While 'Our Lady Of The Flowers' is Genet's only novel to feature a predominantly effeminate homosexual man (Divine, who is at least partially a transvestite) as its protagonist ("Our Lady Of The Flowers," a virile young thug, is a secondary character), most of the other elements of the book will be very familiar to those who have read the balance of his fiction.
Transvestites and transvestite figures abound, as do handsome, amoral, and homosexual or bisexual "toughs," jokes and extended vignettes concerned with lice, flatulence, constipation, and feces, mordant examinations of manhood and the criminal's code of honor, obsession with personal power through emotional betrayal, the long vagabond road to "sainthood," theft, masochistic love, prostitution, and vivid examples of the way in which physical desire and sexuality secretly and subtly fuel, in Genet's view, almost every aspect of life.
As in portions of his other novels, the characters here, even the swaggering, virile young men, are known among their friends by fey pet names like "Darling Daintyfoot," "Mimosa," and "Our Lady of the Flowers," which are intended to be simultaneously affectionate and mocking.
To further confuse, Divine is referred to as a "he" and referred to his surname during his youth and as a "she" and "Divine" in maturity.
As in 'The Miracle of the Rose' and 'Funeral Rites,' characters mesh into one another, exchange identities, and move backward and forward through time at the narrator's whim.
Both "Jean" and the individual characters fuse their own and each other's personalities together as needed, and all occasionally lose control of this process: but Jean Genet, master puppeteer, never does.
Genet's readers are probably aware of the existence of haughty establishment critics who pretentiously embrace Genet's work but nonetheless treat it like something best held at the end of a very long stick.
"Evil" is the word most commonly used to describe Genet's fiction by anxious middlebrow critics who, while distressingly stimulated by his work, feel duty-bound to officially decry its potential for pernicious influence.
Many artists are said to create a "moral universe" within the body of their work; Genet is one of the few that actually does, though his is a mirror universe where amorality reigns.
Genet's world is so exclusively concerned with flea-ridden prostitutes, child murderers who don't wipe themselves, handsome pimps who eat what they scratch out of their noses, prostitutes with rotting teeth, strutting, uneducated alpha male hustlers, and masochistic sodomites--bourgeois emblems of horror all--that the question of "evil" as such in Genet's work becomes obsolete.
While Genet loves and personally glorifies his memories, fictional recreations and their outcast lifestyles, he never objectively condones their actions to his audience.
In all of his novels, Genet finds beauty, suffering, and vulnerability--humanity--in everyone, thus setting a far better example than his hypocritical reviewers.
There is as much "evil" in Genet's books as there is represented by any typical novel's reality principle (for example, all of Genet's characters reveal more humanity and innate dignity than the crass, vacuous crowd Nick Carraway falls in with in Fitzgerald's 'The Great Gatsby') or, for that matter, as there is in the lives of those unstable, morally-confused critics who are simply too cowardly to recognize the world as the diverse, dangerous, devouring, and unstable place that it is.
If 'Our Lady Of The Flowers' proves anything, it's that fifty years after its initial publication, the book is still effectively upsetting the wormy apple carts Genet intended it to.
From the standpoint of Jung's psychological types, Genet's feeling and sensation functions probably predominated in both his life and his writing.
However, his thinking and intuition functions were clearly constellated as well, giving 'Our Lady Of The Flowers' and the masterpieces that followed it unmatched macrocosmic perceptiveness, poetic resonance, and gripping, all-inclusive dramatic power.
Like alchemical "totality" the hermaphrodite, a shaman, or a legitimate Christian saint, mystic Genet seems to have written from a state of undifferentiated consciousness and enjoyed a state of perpetual participation mystique with life.
24 of 31 people found the following review helpful
By A Customer
Format:Paperback
Although I first came across Genet reading "The Thief's Journal", I believe this to be his greatest work (if not the greatest work of modern fiction, better than "Ulysses"). His writing lyrically flows and gives the work an organic unity. No other work, except "Swann's Way" by Proust, has the creative control and beautiful images Genet infuses in his work. A recommended read for all people. A shimmeringly beautiful work of fiction which makes the underworld and the sexual outlaw sublime. (Also, I'd recommend "City of Night" by John Rechy.)
13 of 16 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Jean Genet is surely one of the greatest thinkers of the 20th century - not to mention one of the greatest dreamers. In this book he presents us with a web of characters that can only reach mythical preportions. And, interestingly enough, he reveals that the only reason for their creation is for his own pleasure. So the book becomes like a walk through Genet's subconcious, in which we meet different aspects of the total personality that is Jean Genet. The book is like a dream and throughout it we are confronted with monsters, saints, nuns, prison guards, and the most secret of desires. Genet is the only author I have read who is capable of opening himself so completely - and we do get the feeling that this is written for his own pleasure - this makes it all the more enjoyable for us to read!
Most Recent Customer Reviews
5.0 out of 5 stars
Great
So beautiful!!!!! 18 words are required to write a review. This work is like an fantasy tale that is poetic and sexual
Published 2 months ago by lloydknight
4.0 out of 5 stars
Beauty is ugliness
A bewitching and hypnotic novel from Jean Genet, the first draf of which was written when he was in prison. Like most of his works, Our Lady of the Flowers has a fragmented plot. Read more
Published 2 months ago by A. Christian
3.0 out of 5 stars
Difficult
I knew I was in trouble whern I read Sartre's intro.
I only read part of the book and found it hard going and beyond me. Read more
I only read part of the book and found it hard going and beyond me. Read more
Published 5 months ago by Keith D Brodie
4.0 out of 5 stars
One of Genet's best
Genet was a prominent and controversial French novelist, playwright, poet, essayist, and political activist. Read more
Published 5 months ago by JMV
4.0 out of 5 stars
A tour through the Parisian underworld of Genet's imagination
Universally lauded as a classic sui generis, "Our Lady of the Flowers" is strange and trippy, seemingly incomprehensible and unapproachable. Read more
Published 14 months ago by D. Cloyce Smith
4.0 out of 5 stars
lush, imperfect, subversive classic
Genet's classic is full of lush, flowery, dreamlike prose and images, and genuinely subversive and anti-social themes. Read more
Published 21 months ago by Dale
4.0 out of 5 stars
Review of Frechtman's 'Our Lady of Flowers'
The translation was fair, but I feel it must out on what was likely a more florid and interesting work of prose (forgive the pun). Read more
Published on February 6, 2011 by Ryan S. Mease
2.0 out of 5 stars
Unpleasant, incoherent, self-indulgent
Several older friends have told me that in the 1950s and 1960s, this book was widely revered among gay male readers. Read more
Published on January 24, 2011 by Steven Capsuto
4.0 out of 5 stars
Our Lady, Indeed
Recently, in reviewing the texts for some of the plays by French writer and playwright, Jean Genet, I wrote the following first two paragraphs that apply to an appreciation of his... Read more
Published on March 2, 2010 by Alfred Johnson
5.0 out of 5 stars
fantastic, but not for everyone
Jean Genet's seminal novel "Our Lady of the Flowers" is a glorious celebration of transvestites, lowlifes, prostitutes and murderers in the underworld of 1940s Paris. Read more
Published on November 14, 2007 by N. Turner
What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?
Listmania!
So You'd Like to...
|
|
