Genet

Took me a while to read but truly amazing. Full coverage of Genet's life and White is an excellent researcher. Awesome.
Edmund White explores the perverse extremes of Genet's life and separates the facts from the mythology that Genet himself fashioned. Drawing on interviews with Genet's friends, lovers, publishers, and acquaintances, and using new material from correspondence, journals, police records, psychiatric reports, and other original sources, White reveals a life animated by contradictory impulses: authenticity and dissembling, fidelity and flirtation, domination and submission, honor and betrayal. Throughout, he brilliantly interprets and appraises Genet's astonishing oeuvre, reading the fiction with the focussed attention of a show more novelist and opening up the dense invention of the plays. His masterful and intuitive biography fully illuminates a hitherto enigmatic literary genius. show less

White's biography of Jean Genet is an extensive treatment of his life replete with illuminations, navigating around the shroud of biographical mystery and contradiction that Genet propagated through his novels. This gives readers a complete picture of the man through extensive research and the varied perspectives of those who knew him. White also gives a fair amount of critical attention to Genet's work at just the right points in the overall biographical narrative.

For such a weighty and long biography, it is an infectiously readable book. It is in part because the story of Jean Genet's life is so unusual. His story is that of an orphan and a thief who spent the bulk of his youth in reformatories and prisons only to become one of the show more most important novelists and playwrights of his generation before abandoning these modes of literature to take up revolutionary causes around the world. The readability of this work is due not only to the intriguing nature of its subject, but to White's background and similarity to his subject as both a novelist and as a gay men. White achieves a poetic sense of emotion here that holds echoes of Genet's own work. show less

I am looking forward to reading White's biography much touted in France...[in progress]

Mostly crap. Wish I hadn't already put a Brodart archival dust jacket cover on the stupid thing. Off to Goodwill with another donation. Not worth selling.

La biografia di Jean Genet, scritta da uno dei più importanti scrittori americani della seconda metà del Novecento. Molto lungo ma molto documentato, buoni gli apparati.