Criminal Child: Selected Essays

(Paperback)

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Criminal Child offers the first English translation of a key early work by Jean Genet. In 1949, in the midst of a national debate about improving the French reform-school system, a French radio station commissioned Genet to write about his experience as a juvenile delinquent. He sent back a piece about his youth that was a paean to prison instead of the expected horrifying expose. Revisiting the cruel hazing rituals that had accompanied his incarceration, relishing the special argot spoken behind bars, Genet wondered if regulating that strange other world wouldn't simply prevent future children from discovering their essentially criminal nature in the way that he had. The radio station chose not broadcast Genet's views. "Criminal Child" appears here with a selection of Genet's finest essays, including his celebrated piece on the art of Alberto Giacometti.

Reviews

"Genets multifaceted and wildly original aesthetic is embodied in associative takes and close reads . . . Alsoenthralling are reflections on the inner void, queer life, disease, and death . . . Essential for followers of Genet,inquisitive general readers, and enthusiasts of 20th-century avant-garde French writing. Diane Mehta,Library Journal

[This book is] united by Genets signature probing prose and his fascination with morality, misfits, and art. . . . Throughout, Genet is a deft, sensual, and outrageous criticin regards to theater, he proclaims, A performance that does not act on my soul is vain. Fans will be pleased with this gathering of Genets inimitable reflections on art, life, and his muses. Publishers Weekly

The title essay is a classic work from the great Genet on the institution of French education and what we should do about juvenile criminality. Its a pioneering essay, much of which is still quite relevant today. Andrs Barba,PEN America

[T]his textprovides crucial insights into Genets way of thinking.John Gray,The New Statesman

These selected essays bring us once again the somewhat neglected contrarian voice of Jean Genet . . . including the title essay which is . . . a subtly-nuanced praise piece for the prison experience . . . theseprovocative Genet piecesare certainly worth investigating.Paddy Kehoe,RT

"Genet consistently broke lyrical conventions, creating a narrative approach as a stream of his unique consciousness, unexpectedly poetic. The collection 'The Criminal Child' examines homosexuals' connection to crime, punishment, and our own queerness. His language, provocative and queer, reminds us that Genet was his own creation. Mark William Norby,Bay Area Reporter

Genets sense of language [moved] seamlessly from street argot to the sublime. . . . Genets poetry drew me to write; his imagery drew Robert [Mapplethorpe] to the camera. Patti Smith, The Paris Review

Beside [Genet], Henry Miller is but a cheerfully smutty college sophomore, Sade a dilettante aristocrat of eccentric habits, Gide a genteel old lady sedately cultivating nightshade in her little kitchen garden. Time

Author Bio

Jean Genet (1910-1986) was born in Paris. Abandoned by his mother at seven months, he was raised in state institutions and charged with his first crime when he was ten. After spending many of his teenage years in a reformatory, Genet enrolled in the Foreign Legion, though he later deserted, turning to a life of thieving and pimping that resulted in repeated jail terms and, eventually, a sentence of life imprisonment. In prison he began to write-poems and prose that combined pornography and an open celebration of criminality with an extraordinary baroque, high literary style-and on the strength of this work found himself acclaimed by such literary luminaries as Jean Cocteau, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Simone de Beauvoir, whose advocacy secured a presidential pardon for him in 1948. Between 1944 and 1948 Genet wrote four novels, Our Lady of the Flowers, Miracle of the Rose, Funeral Rites, and Querelle, and the scandalizing memoir A Thief's Journal. Throughout the 1950s he devoted himself to theater, writing the boldly experimental and increasingly political plays The Balcony, The Blacks, and The Screens. After a silence of some twenty years, Genet began his last book, Prisoner of Love, in 1983. It was completed just before he died. Jeffrey Zuckerman is an editor and translator from the French. He is the digital editor of Music & Literature and his recent translations include Ananda Devi's Eye Out of Her Ruins and Antoine Volodine's Radiant Terminus. Zuckerman's writing and translations have appeared in Best European Fiction, the Los Angeles Review of Books, The Paris Review Daily, Tin House, and Vice. He lives in New York. Charlotte Mandell is a translator of French literature. She was born in Hartford, Connecticut, and attended the Universite de Paris III and Bard College. She lives in the Hudson valley.