Additional Book Information
Series: NYRB Classics
ISBN: 9781590170281
Pages: 464
Publication Date: January 31, 2003
Prisoner of Love
by Jean Genet, introduction by Ahdaf Soueif, translated from the French by Barbara Bray
Starting in 1970, Jean Genet—petty thief, prostitute, modernist master—spent two years in the Palestinian refugee camps in Jordan. Always an outcast himself, Genet was drawn to this displaced people, an attraction that was to prove as complicated for him as it was enduring. Prisoner of Love, written some ten years later, when many of the men Genet had known had been killed, and he himself was dying, is a beautifully observed description of that time and those men as well as a reaffirmation of the author’s commitment not only to the Palestinian revolution but to rebellion itself. For Genet’s most overtly political book is also his most personal—the last step in the unrepentantly sacrilegious pilgrimage first recorded in The Thief’s Journal, and a searching meditation, packed with visions, ruses, and contradictions, on such life-and-death issues as the politics of the image and the seductive and treacherous character of identity. Genet’s final masterpiece is a lyrical and philosophical voyage to the bloody intersection of oppression, terror, and desire at the heart of the contemporary world.
Praise
To read Genet is in the end to accept the utterly undomesticated peculiarity of his sensibility, which returns constantly to an area where revolt, passion, death, and regeneration are linked...Surely one of the strangest and most extraordinary books of the decade.
— Edward Said, London Observer
Written with pain's steel nib, it is a product of long incubation, tender and philosophical and almost Proustian.
— Washington Post Book World
For a book about one of the most ideologically heated conflicts of modern times, Prisoner of Love is curiously cool and unpolemical.
— Edmund White