Querelle

by Jean Genet

Paperback, 1987

Status

Available

Call number

PQ2613.E53

Genres

Collections

Your library, University of Pittsburgh

Publication

Grove Pr (1987), Paperback

Description

Set in the port of Brest, this book is the story of a young sailor and the evil and mysterious people whom he attracts. The author has also written Our Lady of the Flowers and Funeral Rites and was closely allied to the French intellectuals led by the late Jean Cocteau.

User reviews

LibraryThing member whitewavedarling

The world of Querelle is immoral, erotic, and steeped in secrets. The prose is consistently poetic and sensual, alternately directed by characters lost to immoral behaviors and characters hiding from their own desires. And then, of course, the characters are all surrounded by sex and murder, if not

directly engaging in both.

The back of the edition I own notes that the word "deals in a startling way with the Dostoevskian theme of murder as an act of total liberation", and the reference to Dostoevsky may be why I bought this book in the first place (I no longer remember)...but either way, Genet's treatment of murder is too similar to his treatment of sex to be taken as a totally separate conversation: both are incredibly personal acts, and sensual because of the hand-to-hand connection between bodies, and both are revelations of power carrying or denying their own unique brands of shame and guilt. One of the fascinating things about Querelle, though, is the shame that he (and others around him) feel regarding their homosexual acts even as he feels no shame about violence and general immorality (unrelated to sexuality). Some of the horror of the novel comes from the outright violence, but some also comes from the fact that all of this rings true: it isn't hard to imagine how contemporary society could leave someone feeling absolute guilt about their sexuality, and none for their violence, though (in my eyes) it should be something nearly unimaginable.

In the end, Genet's writing is intoxicating, and his descriptions luxurious and believable. At times, his style reminded me of both Dostoevsky and James, but the story of Querelle is something else entirely. Yes, this graphically violent and sexual...but then, maybe there's all the more wonder in that since it is also a beautiful novel that seems, unlikely as it is, to still reveal what is good.

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LibraryThing member hbergander

Any of Genet’s novels is a masterpiece, but this book grieves me most deeply, as I have known closely in my life fascinating figures like the sailor Querelle.

LibraryThing member pivic

I was taken aback by this book, mainly because it was so original. It challenged me, which is always welcome. Still, I found the amount of sex distracting from the other stuff; that's on me. Still, it's a breath of fresh air, even 60 years on.

LibraryThing member robfwalter

Maybe Goodreads needs to come up with a bookshelf called Want to Want to Read. I feel really sad to be putting this book aside, but am just not enjoying it. The prose is beautiful, sentence by sentence, but at the paragraph level it is really an ugly mess. We get tedious, in-depth accounts of

Querelle deciding whether or not to continue smiling, and then we don't even find out his decision as we are now too busy imagining how a "youngster" would feel if they were miraculously transmogrified into a crocodile.

I tried the Streatham translation, maybe I'll have a go at the Hollo version in the future, but first I'll try a different Genet book, I think, to try to figure out what all the fuss is about.

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