Prisoner of Love [Hardcover]

Jean Genet (Author), Edmund White (Illustrator), Barbara Bray (Translator)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 1, 1992

his last book, tr Barbara Bray, intro Edmund White

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Reflecting Genet's sympathy for the outcast and his personal revolt against the established order, this dense, episodic montage records the years the Frenchman spent with the Black Panthers in the U.S. in the early 1970s and with Palestinian soldiers in Jordan and Lebanon until his death in 1986. Genet glorifies two male-dominated societies--the Panthers and the PLO--that recall the all-male worlds of his youth in reform school, the army and prison and strains to compare two "virtual martyrs," neither possessing any territory of their own. Part anti-Zionist tract, part memoir and philosophical discourse, this uninhibited cascade of images and associations is less a political document than a map of Genet's mental landscape.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

At the time of his death in 1986, Genet had in manuscript form an account of his stay with the guerrilla armies of the Palestine Liberation Organization during the early 1970s and 1980s. Available for the first time in the United States, this dense and difficult book is suffused with the deathbed recollections of Genet's personal experiences, dreams, digressions forward and backward in time, rumor and hearsay, fact and fiction, which loosely coalesce and whose overall effect is impressionistic rather than straightforwardly informative. What appeals most is Genet's vivid exposition, which relies on metaphorical imagery rather than logical argument to make its point. This book is a biography of a people fated to struggle against unpopular world opinion and overwhelming odds, a very personal portrait of the Palestinian guerrilla movement seen from the viewpoint of a committed social rebel. A fine introduction by Edmund White helps put the book into the context of Genet's personal and political aesthetic. Recommended primarily for larger collections or where the subject or author is already represented.
- Jeffery Ingram, Newport P.L., Ore.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 400 pages
• Publisher: Wesleyan; First Edition edition (April 1, 1992)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0819552461
• ISBN-13: 978-0819552464
• Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 5.5 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #764,422 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

17 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A travel memoir, a masterpiece which can never be equaled, October 25, 2006

By 

T. M. Teale (Colorado Springs, CO, USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Prisoner of Love (New York Review Books Classics) (Paperback)

If the reader is looking for easy explanations to the Palestinian refugees' war with the nation of Israel, Jean Genet's book is not the place to seek them. And I don't advise readers to pick through the text looking for the succinct sentences in which Genet clearly states why he's on the side of the Palestinians, or if he's anti-Israel, or anti-American. There is no proof of reviewer Tim Keane's conclusion that Genet "seethes with hatred of Israel"; there are no such violent emotions in Prisoner of Love. At 430 pages, be prepared to find subtleties of experience shaded by conflicting responses--nuances completely unavailable via print journalism or network news, CNN, or Al Jazeera. But the very fact that Genet wanted to observe life in the refugee camps shows that he had to make a choice. Nearly all the protagonists of his memoir, this textual "souvenirs," are Palestinians and generally Muslim. Indeed, the compelling force which drives the relatively plotless Prisoner of Love are the individuals to whom Jean attachments himself: the dynamic Lieutenant Mubarak, Dr. Mahjoub and the charismatic female doctor, Dr. Nabila, Khaled Abu Khaled and Abu Omar, and an accomplished woman friend, a blond Lebanese guide and translator, Nidal, and dozens of other people. Genet was particularly attached to Hamza and his mother, who he attempts to find again after his absence from Palestine for nearly 14 years. We cannot forget the common fedayee rebel, the fedayeen as a whole who fought to make the Palestinian plight known.

When evaluating Prisoner of Love, it's important to remember that Genet is a writer. Throughout his work, Genet tells us how difficult it is to recount his experiences since he's not sure at times what he's seeing, and he must make his writing conform to the necessities of craft. And whatever writing craft decisions Jean made it is clear that the Palestinians "wrote" him as well; Jean was seldom in control of his experience. As I read, I realized that Genet is the ultimate refugee; he seeks to be with people who are like him. My conclusion is this: Palestine chose him.

Only Genet could have written this book. He is a bruised romantic searching for a resting place that will caress both his homeless intellect and his orphaned body: "A little while ago I wrote that though I shall die, nothing else will. And I must make my meaning clear. Wonder at the sight of a corn-flower, at a rock, at the touch of a rough hand--all the millions of emotions of which I'm made--they won't disappear even though I shall. Other men will experience them, and they'll still be there because of them. More and more I believe I exist in order to be the terrain and proof which show other men that life consists in the uninterrupted emotions flowing through all creation" (361). As an orphan with prison experience, and disaffected from France, Genet was willing to try on other peoples' lives; I suspect that without the structure dictated by the craft of writing, and his talent coming to the attention of well-known writers, Genet would have disappeared into the French prison system.

Another conclusion I came to: Genet shows us the difference between terrorism and Arab nationalism. Is there any hope that the U.S., of which I am a native-born citizen, will ever figure out this difference?

Overwhelmingly, the single image I have of Prisoner of Love is that to read it is to travel the land that dwelled *in* Jean Genet, this traveler who was intelligent enough to let his emotions guide him. And only by reading can I share in living a life which speaks so eloquently of rebellion and blood, of life and death.

14 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars intense,compelling as he allows, Genet a poet,a writer,first, October 11, 2000

By 

scarecrow "scarecrow" (Chicago, Illinois United States) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: Prisoner of Love (Hardcover)

Genet allows you to feel the immediacy of the Palestinian situation with particles from lives,from ill-defined fragments of lives disrupted with no future,he stayed with a family in 1980 a half-day and a whole night where the young son,Hamza a fedayee went off at night to fight. Genet hearing gun fire in the distance inhabited his bed and was brought Turkish coffee and water in the night as a replacement for the young man,by his mother. Genet is a writer/poet,a political thinker,but never a man of politics, a deeply sensitive man,a virtuoso of the sensual image, as the starry-night reflected against the curtain in his room with the small blue table. "Of course it's understood that the words,nights,forests,septet,jubilation desertion and despair are the same words that I have to use to describe the goings on at dawn in the Bois de Boulogne in Paris when the drag queens depart after celebrating their mystery,doing their accounts and smoothing banknotes out of the dew."

Genet was allowed with special permission to visit the massacre site at the camps at Sabra and Chantila,smelling the rotting flesh, "They happened I was affected by them. I talked about them. But while the act of writing came later, after a period of incubation,nevertheless in a moment like that or those when a single cell departs from its usual metabolism and the original link is created of a future,unsuspected cancer,or a piece of lace, so I decided to write this book."

Genet has an intense need for passion of any dimension,scouring the vigours of whatever parts of fragments of the lifeworld's complexity presents itself to him. I once thought of this book as a romantic means of portrayel a betrayel of a political situation,one, the only one that excited Genet.It means something that only encounterings lives in struggle,bent into a repressive state that Genet finds the only life worth encountering,sensing and feeling about. This book was completed in 1986 after suffering from throat cancer, he died on the night of 14-15th of April,1986,while correcting proofs.

5 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A great and unique work., June 25, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Prisoner of Love (Paperback)

This book is absolutely essential to any understanding of the Palestinian situation. It is also the mostimportant work of Genet's entire career.