|
|
Article: Genet: A Biography.
- Article from:
- The Nation
- Article date:
- January 3, 1994
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1994 The Nation Company L.P. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
|
It is hard to imagine that there has ever been a more paradoxical and evasive subject for a biographer to grapple with than Jean Genet. And after reading Edmund White's massive new volume on this criminal turned writer, it's difficult to conceive of a more masterful yet ultimately elusive biography. Perhaps it's inevitably the result of the meeting between Edmund White, among the most respected of contemporary gay novelists, and Jean Genet, the "flagrant" homosexual and "bad boy" genius of twentieth-century literature.
In the larger sense, Genet's life, which was always steeped in controversy if not exactly mystery and subterfuge, has finally been set right (one ...