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Type of bind: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 843.912
EAN num: 9780802130136
ISBN number: 0802130135
Label: Grove Press
Manufacturer: Grove Press
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 272
Printing Date: January 12, 1994
Publishing house: Grove Press
Sale Popularity Level: 80180
Studio: Grove Press
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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 yesterday as when it was very first published in 1943 in a limited edition, thanks to the help of one its earliest admirers, Jean Cocteau.
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Rated by buyers 
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Jean Genet's seminal novel "Our Lady of the Flowers" is a glorious celebration of transvestites, lowlifes, prostitutes and murderers in the underworld of 1940s Paris. Our narrator, Jean, who may or may not be Genet himself, regales the reader from prison with stories he's created about fellow inmates between fits of furious masturbation.
The story begins with the death of Divine, a notorious drag queen and inmate of Jeans. From there Jean goes into the story of the recently canonized Divine, from "her" beginnings as the boy Culafroy to her living in an apartment overlooking the french cemetery Montmartre with her pimp Darling, and a young boy dubbed "Our Lady of the Flowers", whom recently committed a murder.
Our Lady is a brilliant exploration of the darker side of life. But naturally, a novel based around a perverted narrator inventing lives for people in order to help him masturbate isnt exactly for everyone. Id call it a healthy mix of Celine's stylistic sensibilities with Battaile's sexual overtones. An early influence on writers like Bukowski. And the 30 page, raving endorsement from Sartre in the preface should entice the existentialist crowd. So, give it a shot. You'll either be a little grossed out or particularly enthralled.
Rated by buyers 
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I figure to be the lone voice of dissent with this novel, which I found confusing and ultimately uninteresting. Genet's novel, written while in prison, jumps back and forth among the many characters, often following tangent upon tangent. I kept losing track of who was who, which one is supposed to be Genet (because I had the distinct impression that this novel might be autobiographical), sorting out the names and sequences of events, and trying to find a storyline that would last long enough to hold my interest. Genet would start on a good story and then all of a sudden jump in another reflection from that, never satisfactorily returning or finishing the original story.
It's very sexual and delves into the world of transvestism, but ultimately left me more confused than ever about what Genet was trying to say.
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Jean Genet is surely one of the greatest thinkers of the 20th century - not to mention one of the greatest dreamers. In this book he presents us with a web of characters that can only reach mythical preportions. And, interestingly enough, he reveals that the only reason for their creation is for his own pleasure. So the book becomes like a walk through Genet's subconcious, in which we meet different aspects of the total personality that is Jean Genet. The book is like a dream and throughout it we are confronted with monsters, saints, nuns, prison guards, and the most secret of desires. Genet is the only author I have read who is capable of opening himself so completely - and we do get the feeling that this is written for his own pleasure - this makes it all the more enjoyable for us to read!
Rated by buyers -
Jean Genet's seminal Our Lady Of The Flowers (1943) is generally considered to be his finest fictional work. The very first draft was written while Genet was incarcerated in a French prison; when the manuscript was discovered and destroyed by officials, Genet, still a prisoner, immediately set about writing it again. It isn't difficult to understand how and why Genet was able to reproduce the novel under such circumstances, because Our Lady Of The Flowers is nothing less than a mythic recreation of Genet's past and then - present history. Combining memories with facts, fantasies, speculations, irrational dreams, tender emotion, empathy, and philosophical insights, Genet probably made his isolation bearable by retreating into a world not only of his own making, but one over which he had total control.
The imprisoned narrator "Jean," who may or may not be identical with the author, masturbates regularly; like a perpetual motion machine, his fantasies fuel his writing and his writing spurs on his fantasies in turn. Nothing illustrates this more than the brief scene in which self - sustaining "Jean" describes his Tiamat.... Legs thrown over shoulders, "Jean" is not only the serpent that eats its tail but becomes a small, circular, self - imbibing universe all his own. A motto attributed to the alchemists could be the narrator's own: "Every man his own wife."
Though the narrative is not the primary focus of this or any of Genet's novels, most responsible critics have failed to remark on the fact that the narrative of Our Lady Of The Flowers is the least compelling of any found in his five major novels. Our Lady Of The Flowers, does, however, lay the basic groundwork for the novels to come: The Miracle Of The Rose, Funeral Rites, Querelle, and The Thief's Journal (all written between 1944 and 1948).
While Our Lady Of The Flowers is Genet's only novel to feature a predominantly effeminate homosexual man (Divine, who is at least partially a transvestite) as its protagonist ("Our Lady Of The Flowers," a virile young thug, is a secondary character), most of the other elements of the book will be very familiar to those who have read the balance of his fiction. Transvestites and transvestite figures abound, as do handsome, amoral, and homosexual or bisexual "toughs," jokes and extended vignettes concerned with lice, flatulence, constipation, and feces, mordant examinations of manhood and the criminal's code of honor, obsession with personal power through emotional betrayal, the long vagabond road to "sainthood," theft, masochistic love, prostitution, and vivid examples of the way in which physical desire and sexuality secretly and subtly fuel, in Genet's view, almost every aspect of life. As in portions of his other novels, the characters here, even the swaggering, virile young men, are known among their friends by fey pet names like "Darling Daintyfoot," "Mimosa," and "Our Lady of the Flowers," which are intended to be simultaneously affectionate and mocking. To further confuse, Divine is referred to as a "he" and referred to his surname during his youth and as a "she" and "Divine" in maturity. As in the Miracle of the Rose and Funeral Rites, characters mesh into one another, exchange identities, and move backward and forward through time at the narrator's whim. Both "Jean" and the individual characters fuse their own and each other's personalities together as needed, and all occasionally lose control of this process: but Jean Genet, master puppeteer, never does.
Genet's readers are probably aware of the existence of haughty establishment critics who pretentiously embrace Genet's work but nonetheless treat it like something best held at the end of a very long stick. "Evil" is the word most commonly used to describe Genet's fiction by stuffy, anxious middlebrow critics who, while distressingly stimulated by his work, feel duty - bound to officially decry its potential for pernicious influence. Many artists are said to create a "moral universe" within the body of their work; Genet is one of the few that actually does, though his is a mirror universe where amorality reigns. Genet's world is so exclusively concerned with flea - ridden prostitutes, child murderers who don't wipe themselves, handsome pimps who eat what they scratch out of their noses, [prostitutes] with rotting teeth, strutting, uneducated alpha male hustlers, and masochistic sodomites -- bourgeois emblems of horror all -- that the question of "evil" as such in Genet's work becomes obsolete.
While Genet loves and personally glorifies his memories, fictional recreations and their outcast lifestyles, he never objectively condones their actions to his audience. In all of his novels, Genet finds beauty, suffering, and vulnerability - humanity - in everyone, thus setting a far better example than his hypocritical reviewers. There is as much "evil" in Genet's books as there is represented by ... Read More
Rated by buyers -
Somebody should make an opera of this book! I've loved this book since high school, perhaps more than all the others! Genet as always is like a dark narcotic; impossible to shake, and constantly ecstatic. His genius is like a kind of suffocating honey on the page, it pulls your heart out. This edition has a substantive Introduction by Sartre, whose "Saint Genet" is one of the seminal books of the late twentieth century. If you've never read Genet, you've got something coming! What is there to say about literature of this standing? Read it and be ennobled.
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