Volume 14, Number 4 · February 26, 1970
The Tristesse of the Incurable
By V.S. Pritchett
Funeral Rites
by Jean Genet, translated by Bernard Frechtman
Grove Press, 256 pp., $7.50
The Vision of Jean Genet
by Richard N. Coe
Grove Press, 352 pp., $2.95 (paper)
In the most literal sense of the phrase, Genet is a writer who has the courage of his convictions. Out of the lives of criminals, and following a tradition in French literature, he has built an erotic mystique, even a kind of metaphysic. Just as Zola was romantically stimulated by the idea of heredity as a fate, and sex as something for the pathetic brute, so Genet is moved by an aspiration to the state of Absolute Evil. One thinks of him as a Vidocq without the gaiety, slipperiness, and hypocrisy—a Vidocq who has read Dostoevsky; the autodidact of the jails.
Review, 1762 words
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