Article: Genet: A Biography. (book reviews)

No biography is ever wholly true. The art of the biographer lies in arriving at the most accurate misreadings possible, and then transforming these into a chronology of psychological and material causes and effects which make up the document of a life. Jean-Paul Sartre's now-famous conceit about Jean Genet's identity, his coupling of the emblematic categories of "criminal" and "saint," directs one to read the writer's life as a merging of the opposed personae represented in all Genet's texts by those doubled characters like Solange and Claire in The Maids or LeFranc and Maurice in Deathwatch. In Sartre's voluminous study, which did much to establish Genet's reputation as ...

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