Querelle (ISBN 0802151574)

An un-Christian Dostoevsky:
Having read, and hated, _Funeral Rites_ a few years ago, I approached _Querelle_ with diminished expectations. I was quite unprepared for its lyrical prose and complex characterization. Some of the passages from Seblon's journal flow better than any I've read in English, and Genet's metaphorical imagery is often surprising yet apt. I often found myself reminded of my favorite novelist, Dostoevsky, while reading _Querelle_, not only for the redolent, foggy atmosphere but for the extended meditation on evil. While Dostoevsky's works concerned themselves with redemption from evil, however, in many ways Genet writes about evil (or at least criminality) as itself redemptive in some way--that is, when he isn't calling the very notion of redemption itself into question as a liberal humanist fantasy. But what I like the most about this book is not its intellectuality, though there's plenty of that. I most enjoyed how his characters--unbelievably, even uninimaginably bizarre--became in his hands almost commonplace and real. Like Toni Morrison in a different, evil register, Genet's cast is quirky and out-there yet, somehow, not odd at all. Through their very strangeness they become the best exemplars of our real selves.

A Truly Unique Fantasy:
Querelle is perhaps Genet's most interesting novel, indeed, it's his only novel that does not contain directly autobiographical references. Thus, it is an interesting trip into the imagination of this great thinker - and his world of fantasy is enlightening and in a strange way quite profound and poetic. Querelle can be interpreted in many ways - but it cannot be disputed that this story is in a way about the double nature of all human beings. Readers of 'Our Lady of the Flowers' will be familiar with this rich puzzling theme. Genet creates a world, in which, the most hidden desires of men are amplified to the extent that these very desires become a personality unto themseselves. In a way these characters become prisoners to their own fantasies (much of Genet's writing has something to do with prison) and in a most tragic way. The character of Madame Lysiane, for example, is the clearest picture of this imprisonment. She is involved with the two brothers and the neglective Nono - never fully accepted or loved by any one person - she has to live a fragmented life giving parts of herself to many different people at the same time. What makes Genet brilliant is not necesarrily just his portrait of the double, however. There is a certain inevitability in his writing. He seems to believe in a certain fate for all things. His embracing of fate consistently in his prose - makes him, like Kafka, stand out among other writers. He truly was a poet of the highest order. I would recommend starting with 'Querelle' - it is a nice introduction to Genet's work and is perhaps the easiest of all his books to get into.

An Interesting Read:
"Querelle" is the only exposure I have had to Genet's work, and this only after watching the excellent Fassbinder film adaptation. I can honestly say I probably won't read him again, if this is an example of his prose. Heart-stoppingly beautiful in places, I found "Querelle" to be an absolutely bleak fictional reality. Genet's writing style is unique - dense and multi-directional, someone definitely worthy of the name he has obtained. Probably a good deal underrated in the US as well. As impressed as I was, Genet failed to hook me as a reader. Other reviewers have compared Genet to Dostoevsky. I don't enjoy Dostoevsky's writing at all, so perhaps Genet just isn't my speed. Still, a great work is a great work, and I think this is at least a very good one. I think "Querelle" is an important work, which is why I give it 4 stars despite my misgivings. I'd recommend this book to readers who are looking for something way off the beaten path. Provocative and full of texture, this book is an excellent character study and WILL excite a reaction from those readers for whom character study is a main objective.

Murder as Metaphor, Poetry as Perversion:
Genet's world is a man's world. Men fight, steal, hate, lust, and love each other with a primacy that all but excludes women, where it grudgingly admits of their existence at all. In Genet, men encompass even femininity, or, rather, those traits we usually associate with it. Even the straightest characters in *Querelle* are sexually attracted to each other. This ever-present sexual attraction, inevitably mixed with violence even under the best of circumstances, can be seen as metaphoric--an ever-shifting game of domination and submission, victor and vanquished, killer and sacrificial victim that is only made clearer by being raised in intensity through illustration in the sexual act. Genet makes overt what is always and forever sublimated: the connections between sex, power, evil, and pleasure in virtually all human interactions. The title character of Genet's novel is a handsome, seductive, sociopathic sailor who has linked the act of theft and murder into a ritual of mystical transcendence. Not that Querelle himself would see it that way inasmuch as he is a figuration of Genet's ideal beautiful male--a pretty brute, an amoral monster of transcendent physical perfection. Querelle travels the world by ship, murdering and stashing loot at every port, loving them and leaving them, whoever they may be. It helps if you can put aside your own sexual proclivities while reading *Querelle* otherwise it's easy to feel alienated by his creation of the quintessential "homo-fatale." The novel is a rat's warren of crime, sex, and betrayal between its cast of characters--cops, dockworkers, informers, pimps, naval officers, and drug dealers that might be summed up in the words of Mick Jaeger's and Keith Richards' *Sympathy for the Devil*: "Every cop is a criminal and all the sinners saints." Querelle attracts them all--the good, the bad, and the beautiful--and betrays each of them to each other and leaves the port of Brest no different than when he arrived, a trail of shattered bodies, devastated psyches, and forever altered lives behind him. Genet is never an easy read and *Querelle* has the reputation of being one of his more accessible and conventional novels--and I think that's a fair assessment. Still, it's not casual reading. Genet is a demanding prose stylist--elliptical, dense, philosophical. He's given to flights of poetic--and, at times surrealistic--verbal fancy. It's breathtakingly beautiful if you care to follow him into the rarefied atmosphere he inhabits--disorienting and suffocating if you don't. Innovative without being totally obscure, classic but not outdated, Genet's *Querelle* still has much to say and unlike his better known French contemporaries, Sartre, Camus, etc., Genet hasn't enjoyed the appreciation or assimilation he richly deserves. He's opened paths in literature and consciousness that haven't yet been fully traveled all the way to their ends and if for that reason alone he merits reading. Like all true trailblazers, he remains endlessly original.

What else is there to say?:
Well, I'll try to be a little more brief than other reviewers... I wouldn't even write this review, except that I thought there was one area I could add to what has already been said. Querelle is the most concrete and least biographical of Genet's novels. The story could easily be outlined for one of those obnoxious english classes we all had to suffer through. There is no other author in the world like Genet. No one to even compare him to, although people often do (Dostoevsky is a good comparison here though, but not because they write the same way, but rather because of the similar fascination with murder as a liberating act). If you haven't read one of his books, it's difficult to describe his method. He allows concrete realities to bloom imaginatively, and in his books freely allows those to become truth. We call Genet a master, because he can let boundless lyrical images flow through the pages and stir his imagination freely... and yet always have a tight grip on them. Nothing, then, is superfluous. This differentiates him strongly from the French surrealists, and his insistance on beauty and passion over rationality puts him both in existentialism, and also in direct opposition with the literary attempts of Camus and Sartre (who claimed to put sensation over reason, and yet somehow always fail to... in fact, nothing is more pathetic than Camus attempting to be humerous at moments in 'the Plague'... it comes off sounding like television scripts.) If I stated here that his novels are miracles; that they trans-subtantiate when you read them, no one would believe it. But that's how it stands. If you read Genet, and you really feel what he's saying, it will become a living thing with a very real presence. And I can think of no other author who can accomplish this.