Genet’s imagination is a rough, ghoulish nightmare, dominated by men, muscular and yet strangely feminine, Genet’s dangerous yet decorous heroes intoxicate the reader with their bawdy and bellicose behavior-his descriptions of the sexual relations and intercourse between men would seem banal in any other novel, but here they somehow become beautiful, kind of like if a romance novelist took a heady dose of crack and dealt exclusively in the world of homosexual sailors and police officers-there is something intensely innocent in the sexual relations between the male characters as they approach each other with the attitude of a young virgin.

“For several seconds of the eyes of the murderer marveled at the astounding stillness of the forest, where the vault of hanging creepers gilded by a mysterious sun in a dim yet sparkling air filtered through from immense far-distant blue skies, and where the depths were illuminated by the infinitely variables lights and shades of all walking dreams.” The luscious gold of Genet’s prose, a kind of perverse combination of Flaubert and Baudelaire, is truly original and his descriptive powers are extraordinary Genet’s remarkable alchemy, in which the story of a serial killer becomes a kind of paean to murder and Querelle a high poet of murder, resembles the alchemy which Querelle himself undertakes of friends who he betrays but transforms into the gold necklaces, braces and watches which will be his reward for his betrayals. The world of Genet reverberates with blood and poetry, violence and vituperation are transmogrified into poetry, a punch into a flower whose petals scatter via the wind of Genet’s prose, like the blood of the toughs and thugs who populate Genet’s novels.

Querelle jean genet