They should give Jean Genet a kids show. You know, like Sesame Street and Barney and whatever they have now -- Dora the Explorer? Jean could teach the kids outdated pimp argot instead of Spanish! But the language thing would be extra; the reason Genet gets a kids show is that the message of this book is the same as those shows': this message being the glorious imperative to use your imagination."Use your imagination!" When you think about it, it's a bit strange that there's such an emphasis on this in media for children, since they already are using their imaginations (or would be, anyway, if they weren't sitting in front of the TV). Since kids imagine things spontaneously without being told, this hysterical, unnecessary urging by the adults putting out TV probably has less to do with the children's edification than with something the adults are missing themselves. Maybe what Ernie and Barney are really saying is, "Use your imagination NOW, kid, because one day real soon, it is going to shrivel up into a flaccid and desiccated and useless old husk, and you will be serving a life sentence in a filthy French prison called Adulthood, surrounded by bedbugs, sociopaths, and the rank stench of shit. And you'll have no recourse then, and no hope for escape."This, then, in the kids' show I'm developing, provides a nice segue into the basics of how capitalism should work. See, adult, you have no imagination; you are incarcerated (so to speak) in the cramped stinking cell that is reality, from which you cannot escape because you no longer possess that once-prized power to use your imagination. Fortunately, you can benefit from the fruits of our neighbor M. Genet's vigorous labor, since he does still have an imagination, and for a nominal fee he will let you use it (and for a couple francs more, you can use something else of his, too).And this is why we read: to get out of our lives. To get out of our cells. Okay, so that's a bit overwrought, but I mean it. We need other people's books because our brains are not enough, and our own imaginations are too feeble to invent worlds that will make ourselves free. See, I bet that would've sounded less cheesy if I'd written it in French! Those bastards really do get away with a lot.Awhile ago I reviewed Jim Thompson on here, and someone on the thread wondered if he'd ever read Proust. The thought of that made my stomach lurch -- of course he didn't! gross! -- but I'm willing to bet Genet read both guys (maybe at the same time), and swallowed them in the same mouthful with no sense of dissonance.I definitely wouldn't recommend this to everyone. It's almost assaultively poetic and gorgeous while incredibly raunchy and scatological, like an overpowering bouquet of gardenias and lilacs with erect penises popping out between the petals, in a cracked crystal vase set on the back of an overflowing toilet. If you think you might be fascinated by a swooningly imaginative, lovely fever dream of a pre-pre-Stonewall, pre-pre-pre-AIDS degenerate homosexual underworld and aesthetic, then this could potentially be a book you'd enjoy. Think pimps, wigs and teacups, thieves, murderers and pearls, boxers and graveyards, news clippings of killers, and a drag ball of queens in stained nineteenth-century gowns.... Think cock after cock after huge erect cock, with paeans to farting and a few trips to Mass. There's a trial. There's a funeral. There's a lot of jacking off! Instead of furry blue monster Grover's "cooperation," M. Genet's neighborhood would emphasize the importance of "la masturbation," an almost diametrically opposite concept but one also essential for the development of young people.If I were a more artistic soul myself, I might try and put together a Geneted-out Sesame Street version, since the pimps and queens would make beautiful muppets, and the animated sequences could really be something. Our Lady of the Flowers doesn't need that, though. It doesn't need me or anyone else; we need it! Truthfully, I think I really did need Our Lady. This is the first book I've read in awhile that actually changed the way that I think; I feel like it gave me a bit of a trepanning, sort of relieved some pressure on the skull and gave my uninteresting organ some more room to breathe. I was really living in the world a bit too much, and now I'm not here if I don't need to be. Genet did remind me that I don't have to stay here, and that if things become too oppressive I can just run off to become a male prostitute and live in a Parisian garret above a cemetery with my Negro and my adolescent psychopath, and a whole lot of drugs and makeup and fake jewels. It's too bad the fascistic policies of public television would likely not allow this glorious message of freedom to be shared with a nation of tots. For now, unfortunately, this book is limited to people who have learned how to read. The good news is, you can probably buy it used for a dollar! Though I might recommend a newer edition than the one I have, which identifies itself on the cover as "A SHATTERING NOVEL OF HUMAN DEPRAVITY," which will make people look at you like you're just reading a bunch of trash. Which you are not. You're just using your imagination!
“The despondency that follows makes me feel somewhat like a shipwrecked man who spies a sail, sees himself saved, and suddenly remembers that the lens of his spyglass has a flaw, a blurred spot -- the sail he has seen.” I think everybody who tries to write a review about Our Lady of the Flowers starts out confounded, befuddled, muddled as to where to start because for one thing Genet's writing style has jumbled up the coherent, organized part of your brain.I was fortunate that the edition I chose to read included the Jean-Paul Sartre introduction. I'm sometimes on the fence about introductions, especially long introductions, Sartre's intro is 49 pages, because I think sometimes they suck the life out of the novel before you even have a chance to read the first page. Many introductions also assume that the reader has read the book previously. I took a chance mainly because I like Sartre and he did a wonderful job of preparing me for what I was about to experience.This book is an ode to onanistic activities or in other words masturbation. To be more specific this is a collection of fantasies that Genet wrote while in prison to help him achieve a chain of orgasms. Yes there are explicitly written parts, but do not categorize this book as pornography or a book of cheap thrills. Genet writes such lush, evocative scenes that the sex that may or may not occur is immaterial. Really this is about passion. This is about Genet making love to himself. The characters that flow through this novel from Divine, to Darling, to Our Lady of the Flowers, to Mimosa are all just derivatives of himself. He uses shells of ultra masculine males, gypsies, thieves, and beautiful young boys, that he has cut out of magazines, to fulfill his sexual fantasies, but underneath in the hollow parts of their bodies they are Jean Genet. "When she talks to herself about Darling, Divine says, clasping her hands in thought: I worship him. When I see him lying naked, I feel like saying mass on his chest." We all hope that we can experience a moment where someone feels this way about us. For Jean Genet these characters sprang from his imagination fully formed as the perfect, flawed lovers that his mind could move about like furniture building up fantasies that ultimately leads to his satisfaction. Our Lady of the Flowers by Miriam Laufer"Darling's life is an underground heaven thronged with barmen, pimps, queers, ladies of the night, and Queens of Spades, but his life is a heaven. He is voluptuary. He knows all the cafes in Paris where the toilets have seats. To do a good job, he says, I've got to be sitting down. He walks for miles, preciously carrying in his bowels the desire to shit, which he will gravely deposit in the mauve tiled toilets of the Cafe Terminus at the Saint-Lazare station."I thought this was a good example of Genet talking about something most of us never want or need to talk about and yet when I read this I had to stop and read it again and again because it is a beautiful statement about one of the most base things that we all are required by our design to perform. Yet he jolts us by uses the coarse word shit which is quickly softened with the word mauve. He has made taking a crap a pilgrimage, an event, that the character Darling will cherish, and look forward to consummating. And consuming. “I wanted to swallow myself by opening my mouth very wide and turning it over my head so that it would take in my whole body, and then the Universe, until all that would remain of me would be a ball of eaten thing which little by little would be annihilated: that is how I see the end of the world.” I've never read anything like this. There are flashes of Genet in the stream of consciousness of the Beat writers, certainly Thomas Pynchon had read Genet before writing Gravity's Rainbow. The surprising part of the book is how accessible it is. This book was compelling to read and even though some of the twists and turns left me dazed and confused I just let it wash over me and continued on.
What do You think about Our Lady Of The Flowers (2004)?
So many pages of glowing reviews for this book, but I just can't get on the train.I found this quote that I liked:“My heart to my mother, my cock to the whores, my head to the hangman.”It was hard to find other quotes. They're just not relatable outside of the context of this book. The book is very well written but at the same time so personal it's like a journey inside Genet's head and it's so easy to get lost on the trip.There is a very loose narrative accompanying the story that darts and weaves between poetry by Genet, the story is more a poem than a novel. I wanted to like it, I get that it changed the definition of writing structure, I get that it was subversive, I get that the way he writes flows beautifully and while reading the book I wished I understood French better to appreciate more the puns and plays on words. But, but, but... So often I wouldn't even be able to finish a sentence without Genet getting so far side-tracked on his own mental voyage that I lost the plot. The book is masturbatory but in that same way it's also very personal to Genet and very difficult for outsiders to appreciate. Also too much poop and farting.The book reminds me of an abstract painting and while you can appreciate the talent in the artist, it just doesn't speak to me.
—Adam Dunn
Never thought I'd suggest that a novel devoted to praising penis should be adapted for Broadway, but here we are. So, when I wrote my dear friend to ask if he cared that I doodled all throughout his book, he responded: "NP. Fascinated to see what sapphic undertones you can wrench out of the depths of Jean Genet's dick-swinging fiesta." YEA. That was pretty hard to do; the soundtrack to this text screams PENIS-PRICKS-STICKS. (Somehow though, it's surprisingly NOT misogynistic, and almost HAWT, even, IMHO) Anyway, who knew that dicks and "Homoseckshuals" were so worthy of admiration?Genet captures the world of those "who are willing to jerk you off, but only with their feet" and speaks of *self-love* and bodily functions with a familiarity usually reserved for adolescent journals. There's a lot more here than that, but c'mon, that's the juicy part.If you're interested in humanity, saints, sins, psychology, mind-blowingly fucked up yet absolutely normal shit, disgusting human truths, beauty, crime, and language, please read this. Genet is a brilliant dude. To end in cliche, if everyone could write how he wrote, we'd never manage to life our noses out of books.
—sheena
A beautifully written novel with very little plot to speak of and a moral compass whose north pole has been replaced with orgasmic bliss. It's hard to treat this work like a novel since the telling of it is very cyclic, always circling back to the fundamental function of onanistic utility. These are stories Genet tells himself in order to die small deaths. Ostensibly the protagonist is a trans prostitute named Divine, who is more a projection of the narrators fantasies than a fully formed character, and her love affairs with men in Paris. She falls in with Pimps and Murderers and lives in an underworld that is presented a universe as glamorous as Proust's high society. Violence and cruelty are often seen through the gauzy lens of masculine sexuality, the highest form of swagger. Divine is not just named Divine because she is wonderful (the gender pronouns switch as fluidly in this book as in a Magnetic Fields Song). There are also interesting religious overtones to the work. While she does not hold western religious values (murder elevates ones sexual desirability in this world) the Roman Catholic church is a site of much enjoyment for Divine for it's rituals. Transubstantiation, that is the consumption of Christs body, is used as a repeated image in part for the profane implication of sexualizing something so sacred. The writing is quite poetic and often elicit vivid images and stirring metaphors. However, it is in service to a single task, and after a while one grows weary of it's intention. One feels by the end that the narrators wrist should be strained, and he should have spent more time in prison reflecting on some other matters about the world he inhabits and how he ended up in that world.
—Alex Flynn
