The Thief's Journal

Sartre says that this is the best of Genet's novels, and I am inclined to agree because if both it and Our Lady of the Flowers are so mesmerizing, what chance is there that yet another of his novels would stand up to the same pedigree? In a similar manner to his first novel, here Genet transforms

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lowlife hoodlums into beautiful beings of memory through the alchemy of poetry, though all of the characters and the scenes here seem so much closer to the narrator's heart.

It is an act of love. To extract from these scenes some element that made them sing and personified their hidden beauty. Beauty which to any passerby would be lost, and maybe it would even be lost to Jean himself in the moment. It is when we relive the past in memory that we find even the most perplexing and worrisome scenes covered in a glaze of loveliness. That phenomena is what is conveyed here, to such a precise degree that it startles the reader.

More precisely, through memory and with the tools of poetry Genet allows evil to become good. He slices the faces from lovely Grecian boys to paste them over the the sneering skulls of hell-goats. It seems, more accurately, that he does not turn that which is evil into the good, but that he extracts that which is beautiful from that which is evil, and thus finds the goodness.

"I learned that even flowers are black at night ..."

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Genet was a crook. Otherwise also a genius with words that translate poorly.