Funeral Rites - Softcover

Genet, M. Jean

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0571340857 ISBN 13: 9780571340859

Publisher: Faber & Faber, 2019

Synopsis

Jean Genet, French playwright, novelist and poet, turned the experiences in his life amongst pimps, whores, thugs and other fellow social outcasts into a poetic literature, with an honesty and explicitness unprecedented at the time. Widely considered an outstanding and unique figure in French literature, Genet wrote five novels between 1942 and 1947, now being republished by Faber & Faber in beautiful new paperback editions.

Jean Genet began to write his third novel in 1943, but it was to be changed utterly by the death of Jean Decarnin. Genet's sensual and brutal portrait of the Second World War unfolds between the poles of his grief for his lover Jean, killed in the Resistance during the liberation of Paris, and his perverse attraction to the collaborator Riton. Powerfully written, and with moments of great poetic subtlety, Funeral Rites is a dark meditation on the mirror images of love and hate, sex and death.

Includes a new introduction by Neil Bartlett.

About this title

About the Authors

Jean Genet was born in Paris in 1910. An illegitimate child who never knew his parents, he was abandoned to the Public Assistance Authorities. He was ten when he was sent to a reformatory for stealing; thereafter he spent time in the prisons of nearly every country he visited in thirty years of prowling through the European underworld. With ten convictions for theft in France to his credit he was, the eleventh time, condemned to life imprisonment. Eventually he was granted a pardon by President Auriol as a result of appeals from France's leading artists and writers led by Jean Cocteau.$$$His first novel, Our Lady of the Flowers, was written while he was in prison, followed by Miracle of the Rose, the autobiographical The Thief's Journal, Querelle of Brest and Funeral Rites. He wrote six plays: The Balcony, The Blacks, The Screens, The Maids, Deathwatch and Splendid's (the manuscript of which was rediscovered only in 1993). Jean Genet died in 1986.

Bernard Frechtman was the acclaimed translator of works by Sartre, Genet, Picasso and Céline.

Edition details

• Publisher: Faber & Faber
• Publication date: 2019
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0571340857
• ISBN 13: 9780571340859
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 272