Querelle

This is not and never was a conventional novel. As with all Genet, it's transgressive and beautiful. I didn't find it as good as Our Lady of the Flowers, but a close second. Genet always takes some work, but pays off.

I always thought the film of Querelle was a classic. After recently watching it again, I decided to re-read the book. Genet's books are challenging but worth the time invested.

Shows the struggle between good and evil, heterosexual and homosexual tendencies. It's almost like a real account of what life is verses for instance stories that are reluctant to touch on reality.

A true classic

This version has a few typos throughout the book that can detract from the story, but overall it has been a pleasure to read!

GENET IS A GOD. This book should be required reading.

Genet's world is a man's world. Men fight, steal, hate, lust, and love each other with a primacy that all but excludes women, where it grudgingly admits of their existence at all. In Genet, men encompass even femininity, or, rather, those traits we usually associate with it. Even the straightest characters in *Querelle* are sexually attracted to each other. This ever-present sexual attraction, inevitably mixed with violence even under the best of circumstances, can be seen as metaphoric--an ever-shifting game of domination and submission, victor and vanquished, killer and sacrificial victim that is only made clearer by being raised in intensity through illustration in the sexual act. Genet makes overt what is always and forever sublimated: the connections between sex, power, evil, and pleasure in virtually all human interactions.The title character of Genet's novel is a handsome, seductive, sociopathic sailor who has linked the act of theft and murder into a ritual of mystical transcendence. Not that Querelle himself would see it that way inasmuch as he is a figuration of Genet's ideal beautiful male--a pretty brute, an amoral monster of transcendent physical perfection. Querelle travels the world by ship, murdering and stashing loot at every port, loving them and leaving them, whoever they may be.It helps if you can put aside your own sexual proclivities while reading *Querelle* otherwise it's easy to feel alienated by his creation of the quintessential "homo-fatale." The novel is a rat's warren of crime, sex, and betrayal between its cast of characters--cops, dockworkers, informers, pimps, naval officers, and drug dealers that might be summed up in the words of Mick Jaeger's and Keith Richards' *Sympathy for the Devil*: "Every cop is a criminal and all the sinners saints." Querelle attracts them all--the good, the bad, and the beautiful--and betrays each of them to each other and leaves the port of Brest no different than when he arrived, a trail of shattered bodies, devastated psyches, and forever altered lives behind him.Genet is never an easy read and *Querelle* has the reputation of being one of his more accessible and conventional novels--and I think that's a fair assessment. Still, it's not casual reading. Genet is a demanding prose stylist--elliptical, dense, philosophical. He's given to flights of poetic--and, at times surrealistic--verbal fancy. It's breathtakingly beautiful if you care to follow him into the rarefied atmosphere he inhabits--disorienting and suffocating if you don't. Innovative without being totally obscure, classic but not outdated, Genet's *Querelle* still has much to say and unlike his better known French contemporaries, Sartre, Camus, etc., Genet hasn't enjoyed the appreciation or assimilation he richly deserves. He's opened paths in literature and consciousness that haven't yet been fully traveled all the way to their ends and if for that reason alone he merits reading. Like all true trailblazers, he remains endlessly original.

Well, I'll try to be a little more brief than other reviewers...I wouldn't even write this review, except that I thought there was one area I could add to what has already been said. Querelle is the most concrete and least biographical of Genet's novels. The story could easily be outlined for one of those obnoxious english classes we all had to suffer through.There is no other author in the world like Genet. No one to even compare him to, although people often do (Dostoevsky is a good comparison here though, but not because they write the same way, but rather because of the similar fascination with murder as a liberating act). If you haven't read one of his books, it's difficult to describe his method. He allows concrete realities to bloom imaginatively, and in his books freely allows those to become truth. We call Genet a master, because he can let boundless lyrical images flow through the pages and stir his imagination freely... and yet always have a tight grip on them. Nothing, then, is superfluous. This differentiates him strongly from the French surrealists, and his insistance on beauty and passion over rationality puts him both in existentialism, and also in direct opposition with the literary attempts of Camus and Sartre (who claimed to put sensation over reason, and yet somehow always fail to... in fact, nothing is more pathetic than Camus attempting to be humerous at moments in 'the Plague'... it comes off sounding like television scripts.) If I stated here that his novels are miracles; that they trans-subtantiate when you read them, no one would believe it. But that's how it stands. If you read Genet, and you really feel what he's saying, it will become a living thing with a very real presence. And I can think of no other author who can accomplish this.