Our Lady of the Flowers

by Jean Genet, Jean-Paul Sartre (Introduction)

Overview

Jean Genet's masterpiece, composed entirely in the solitude of his prison cell. With an introduction by Jean-Paul Sartre.

Jean Genet's first, and arguably greatest, novel was written while he was in prison. As Sartre recounts in his introduction, Genet penned this work on the brown paper which inmates were supposed to use to fold bags as a form of occupational therapy. The masterpiece he managed to produce under those difficult conditions is a lyrical portrait of the criminal underground of Paris and the thieves, murderers and pimps who occupied it. Genet approached this world through his protagonist, Divine, a male transvestite prostitute. In the world of Our Lady of the Flowers, moral conventions are turned on their head. Sinners are portrayed as saints and when evil is not celebrated outright, it is at least viewed with a benign indifference. Whether one finds Genet's work shocking or thrilling, the novel remains almost as revolutionary today as when it was first published in 1943 in a limited edition, thanks to the help of one its earliest admirers, Jean Cocteau.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780802130136
Publisher:	Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Publication date:	01/12/1994
Series:	Genet, Jean
Edition description:	Reissue
Pages:	272
Sales rank:	176,472
Product dimensions:	5.75(w) x 8.50(h) x (d)

About the Author

Sartre was born in Paris, France. He had a doctorate in philosophy.

What People are Saying About This

Terry Southern

A matchless contemporary classic....Like Ulysses in its own day, so creatively formidable that any comment on its merit becomes at once presumptuous.

Richard Wright

Genet has taken a tabooed subject and created a world that is out of this world. He is a magician, an enchanter of the first order.

Susan Sontag

Only a handful of twentieth-century writers, such as Kafka and Proust, have as important, as authoritative, as irrevocable a voice and style.

Editorial Reviews

Elegiac elegance, alternately muted, languorous, vituperative, tender, glamorous, bitchy, lush, mockingly feminine, "high camp," overripe, vigorous, rigorous, exalted....A remarkable, sensitive achievement.

NY Times Book Review

Incredible, appalling, thrilling, disturbing, offbeat, eloquent, violently crude, yet compelling. Reflects, as no other book of our time, the lower depths of human existence.

Boston Herald