BOOKS

Notices and reviews of books, articles, plays and poetry dealing with homosexuality and the sex variant. Readers are invited to send in reviews or printed matter for review.

OUR LADY OF THE FLOWERS

by Jean Genet, translated by Bernard Frechtman, introduction by Jean-Paul Sartre, Grove Press, N.Y., 1963, $6.50.

Every year scores of novels are labelled great by reviewers. They fade from popularity, from memory. A decade later they are unreadable. But the practice of over-praising continues and makes writing the review of a truly great novel difficult.

Yet once, twice, maybe three times in a generation a great novel does appear. Our Lady of the Flowers is one of these. Written in a French prison more than twenty years ago. this story of Paris queens, faggots, hustlers, murderers, has only now legally become accessible to American readers. It has already proved itself an enduring work. It is more.

To begin with, it is written with enormous compassion. It is prompted by pity for human life, tenderness. forgiveness. More. Understanding. But it is not a soft book. Life is depicted here in terms some will find too strong to stomach.

Genet sets down his characters in all their natural-and I stress that word, natural-filth. He does not smear them with filth for shock effect. With the instinct of the truly great novelist, he knows that the exact truth about human nature is

more shocking than what is merely imaginable.

Yet he has a superb imagination. Even to have conceived the idea for such a novel is an achievement beyond any but the most gifted. Actually to have written it was the work of genius. Its framework is complex. The novelist is himself a vital character. He often interrupts the narrative to confide his creative problems to the reader. Yet, knowing as the reader does that the characters are mere masturbatory fantasms, they still come alive with stunning reality.

The prose in which Our Lady of the Flowers is written is of such originality that it ranks with the finest of twentieth century poetry. The translator is to be commended. Genet has marked every passage with word images of beauty and force. There are hundreds. To choose one or even half a dozen examples for this review would be unjust.

Yet the prose is not artificial. Nothing about Our Lady of the Flowers is that. The images merely heighten the reality, deepen it, widen it. To read this book is to live the life depicted in it. No sounder praise can be given any novel. No single attribute can better assure a novel immortality.

Characters, times, places shift as in dreams, as in reverie, during the

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