Description
Title: Crime of Jean Genet, The
Author: EDDE DOMINIQUE
Illustrator: RUBENS ANDREW/SCHWARTZ (TRANSLATORS)
Format: PAPERBACK
Publication date: 01/09/2023
Imprint: SEAGULL BOOKS
Price: $25.00
Publishing status: Active
Dominique Edde met novelist and playwright Jean Genet in the 1970s. And she never forgot him. ‘His presence’, she writes, ‘gave me the sensation of icy fire. Like his words, his gestures were full, calculated and precise […] Genet’s movements mimicked the movement of time, accumulating rather than passing.’
This book is Edde’s account of that meeting and its ripples through her years of engaging with Genet’s life and work. Rooted in personal reminiscences, it is nonetheless much broader, offering a subtle analysis of Genet’s work and teasing out largely unconsidered themes, like the absence of the father, which becomes a metaphor for Genet’s perpetual attack on the law. Tying Genet to Dostoevsky through their shared fascination with crime, Edde helps us more clearly understand Genet’s relationship to France and Palestine, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, the theater, and even death. A powerful personal account of the influence of one writer on another, The Crime of Jean Genet is also one of the most penetrating explorations yet of Genet’s work and achievement.
‘Edde’s book is an intelligent but not reverential account of the way in which Jean Genet fascinated and intimidated her.’ – Times Literary Supplement
‘For an American reader (or writer) currently agonizing over the degradation of civic values, The Crime of Jean Genet insists on a bracing distinction between literary art that assumes its anger exerts a force for change versus writing that \”never seeks to resolve or explain but, rather, to dissolve and destroy.\”‘ – On the Seawall
Review: \”Edde’s book is an intelligent but not reverential account of the way in which Jean Genet fascinated and intimidated her.\” * Times Literary Supplement *
\”For an American reader (or writer) currently agonizing over the degradation of civic values, The Crime of Jean Genet insists on a bracing distinction between literary art that assumes its anger exerts a force for change versus writing that ‘never seeks to resolve or explain but, rather, to dissolve and destroy.’\” * On the Seawall *
Contents: Dominique Edde
The Crime of Jean Genet
Translated by Andrew Rubens and Ros Schwartz
Author Biography: Dominique Edde is the author of several novels, including, most recently, Kamal Jann and Kite, both published by Seagull Books. Andrew Rubens is a writer and translator whose work has appeared in the Glasgow Review of Books, Charlie Hebdo, and PN Review.Ros Schwartz is a translator of fiction and nonfiction and the chair of English PEN’s Writers in Translation program.
Series: The French List
ISBN: 9780857428721
Dimension: 203mm X 127mm
Edition: 01