Miracle of the Rose

by Jean Genet

Book Overview

This nightmarish account of prison life during the German occupation of France is dominated by the figure of the condemned murderer Harcamone, who takes root and bears unearthly blooms in the ecstatic and brooding imagination of his fellow prisoner Genet.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0394174704
• ISBN13: 9780394174709
• Release Date: January 1966
• Publisher: Grove Pr
• Weight: 1.15 lbs.

Customer Reviews

The master of the 20th Century

In the 60's, it was cool to like Genet. Ginsberg even made a reference to the boys in Kansas reading him (aspiring to a future when even the clodhoppers would be enlightened). There are really some fantastic reviews for this book on here, so I'll try to cover some new ground in a brief manner. A lot of people have no idea who Genet is. He died in 1986, just in the finishing stages of a book (Prisoner of Love)... his first since the Thief's Journal, almost 30 years before it. He had surfaced briefly to author some of the most incredible dramatic works ever... in fact, far greater than his novels, and his novels are some of the greatest of all time (definitely ranks with Dostoevsky). There is no explanation for Genet. He wrote Our Lady of the Flowers in prison, and it was a masterpiece. And the he wrote four more. And then he stopped. Just like Shakespeare, he came from nowhere, and he stopped when he decided it was time to stop. His books are intensly 'evil', but they're also incredibly lyrical and always beautiful. They're also quite profound, not just morally, but also in the way that he freely transposes his world, interacts with his creation, and commands powerful meanings from the simplest gestures. Specifically this book deals with his obsession with a fellow prisoner, condemned to die for a murder. The book is the process by which Harcamone (the murderer) develops and blooms in Genet's mind, ultimately culminating in a feverish and spiritually tormented vision of the mystery of Harcamone. His works make effective use of the ritual and spiritual processes, and although I don't believe they will make you evil, I think you'll find that your imagination will be enlightened, and you will be able to view the mundane world around you in a new and passionately intense way after reading his books. Genet realized that everything has the power to become significant and sanctified through our imagination, and he's especially good to read if you are at all interested in Nietzsche, Freud or anything dealing with existentialism. If you haven't read him, do not do anything until you do. If you have, make sure you let some people borrow your books... those of us who love his work need to make sure we do our best not to let him fall into obscurity.

A Sinking Ship Shall Cast The Light Upon The Land

Genet's second novel is a phantasmagorical account of his youthful incarceration in the Mettray penal colony and subsequent imprisonment in the adult facility of Fountevrault. The author portrays Mettray as a womb like hive of sunless corridors and constricting passages that both shelters the prisoners and guards and incubates their stark attempts at individual development. The formless men of Mettray constantly meld and mesh into one another, existing between mental and emotional states of absolute being and permanent dissolution and drift. Genet sees the hieratical Mettray as "the universe itself," something he finds "fabulous." Surrounded by 400 other confined men, many who are attractive and apparently virile, young Genet searches for potential lovers and models upon which he might base his coreless identity. The narrator identifies these young men as his literal brothers, born from the same maternal body of childhood desolation leading to crime, and is highly drawn to this incestuous angle of his attractions. He describes the other boys "stroking themselves" in unison alone in their single unit cells, the mixed perfume of wisteria and rose vines creating a "vegetable incest" which wafts over their dreaming heads; he "yearns for a mother," feels he's returned, via Mettray, to "the mother's throbbing breast," and describes the prison and his mood as permanently tinted in autumnal shades. The female principle reasonably dominates the state of male immaturity, and in both benevolent and malevolent fashion, for Mettray is surrounded by a minefield of "traps laid by women's hands" that create an "invisible, undetectable danger" which throws would be escapees into "wild panic." For hoping to gain the fifty franc reward that comes with each capture, local women lie in silent, unseen wait like archetypal witches, accompanied by shotguns, pitchforks, and dogs. Unloved, cast out, and uneducated, the instinctively virility-seeking boys of Mettray are little more than unindividuated eggs united in a desperate search for a master sperm bearer to fertilize and transform them into legitimate men. Each acts as a 'double' for another, but combined, the two halves still add up to less than one definite being. Though some "big guys" and "toughs," especially mysterious Christ figure Harcomone act as witting or unwitting father substitutes to those in need, Mother conquers in the end. Returning years later to find Mettray in ruins, Genet sadly notes that swallows have built their nests in its window ledges, grass sprouts between the impregnable stones, and thorn bearing vegetation covers and "pierces" the place. The rugged house of troubled, fragile lads has returned to the soil forever. Fifteen years later, at Fountevrault, Genet finds hero and double murderer Harcomone locked in irons in solitary confinement, condemned to death. He discovers Fountevrault's foundational hub when he stumbles upon former Mettray lover Divers, a powerful and handsome tough, freaki

a miracle of a novel

A breathtaking, uplifting work -- mesmerising & unflinching of beauty wherever it is found. One hears people talk about an infinite capacity to bear pain -- it is not so different as the capacity to bear infinite beauty. If you want the example of such a man, read Genet.The sheer intensity of this book, its fearlessness, its devotion to what is human, is astonishing. This was the first Genet novel I read, & I was converted. Genet understands that what is human is also that which is superhuman, and subhuman.

miracle of rose-like language

yes, the subject matter is rare to literature, is fascinating in its own right; yes, the connection between genet and sartre (genet was felt as a literal human manifestation of sartre's philosophy) leads increasingly tiny cabals of intellectuals to genet's work, but it is his mastery of language, his ability to use words that make the grotesque suddenly and overwhelmingly beautiful that makes genet's work so powerful and exceptional. read slowly, indulge in the rare beauty of the language, read again and again

Brutally honest and written with a keen and generous hand.

Jean Genet's ``Miracle Of The Rose. '' is a modern masterpiece written by one of France's most tortured and brillian writers. An honest reflection of prison, men, love and pain; the characters fix together in a brutal recollection of childhood memories, lost loves, hope and the fight against stagnation and conformity within the bleak and often romantic prison walls. Genet, writes firsthand as having been orphaned and raised in a disciplinary `warehouse 'for wayward youth. He was imprisoned several times during his lifetime and ``The Miracle Of The Rose. '' is a journal of his experiences there, the prison becomes the setting for secret romances and courthships, the saintliness of the prisoner who turns his chains into roses and the connection between these men who have shared their lives together. Hitting upon the often vilified role of sex in prison and love between men, Genet makes the characters all the more human for the brutality of his recollection. He sweetly takes EVIL in hand and charges pornography with poetry and pain with pleasure. Combining the complexity of the human soul and the God fearing body, Genet has written a book that supercedes any of Sade's wildest fantasies or greater humanitarian views. Genet is considered one of Modern Europe's greatest writers and was succesfully petitioned out of a life time prison sentence in France by Sartre and other leading intellectuals and visionaries, Genet's, `` Miracle Of The Rose '' is a riveting must.