Our Lady of the Flowers [Paperback]

Jean Genet (Author), Bernard Frechtman (Translator), Jean-Paul Sartre (Introduction)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 1, 1987

Jean Genet's seminal Our Lady Of The Flowers (1943) is generally considered to be his finest fictional work. 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.

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 --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

Language Notes

Text: English, French (translation) --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 307 pages
• Publisher: Grove Press; 1st Evergreen edition (January 1, 1987)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1596541369
• ISBN-13: 978-1596541368
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.1 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.1 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (15 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,307,798 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

67 of 73 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars "Crime Begins With A Carelessly Worn Beret", April 23, 2003

By 

J. E. Barnes - See all my reviews

This review is from: Our Lady of the Flowers (Paperback)

Jean Genet's seminal Our Lady Of The Flowers (1943) is generally considered to be his finest fictional work. 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 his Tiamat.... Legs thrown over shoulders, "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 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 stuffy, 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.

23 of 30 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An unparalleled literary masterpiece, January 11, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Our Lady of the Flowers (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.)

12 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Most Beautiful Song of the Imagination, December 13, 2004

By 

Stalwart Kreinblaster "SK2008" (Xanadu) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Our Lady of the Flowers (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!