The Thief's Journal
By (Author) M. Jean Genet
Translated by Bernard Frechtman
Faber & Faber
Faber & Faber
1st April 2019
7th March 2019
Main
United Kingdom
General
Fiction
Biographical fiction / autobiographical fiction
843.912
Paperback
256
Width 130mm, Height 195mm, Spine 12mm
215g
The Thief's Journal is perhaps Jean Genet's most authentically autobiographical novel; an account of his impoverished travels across 1930s Europe. The narrator is guilty of vagrancy, petty theft and prostitution, but his writing transforms such degradations into an inverted moral code, where criminality and delinquency become heroic. With a holy trinity of his own making - homosexuality, theft and betrayal - in The Thief's Journal Genet produced a startlingly powerful novel without precedent.
Jean Genet, (born Dec. 19, 1910, Paris, France - died April 15, 1986, Paris), French criminal and social outcast turned writer who, as a novelist, transformed erotic and often obscene subject matter into a poetic vision of the universe and, as a dramatist, became a leading figure in the avant-garde theatre, especially the Theatre of the Absurd.