Querelle

Rating:
Summary: An Interesting Read
Review: "Querelle" is the only exposure I have had to Genet's work, and this only after watching the excellent Fassbinder film adaptation. I can honestly say I probably won't read him again, if this is an example of his prose. Heart-stoppingly beautiful in places, I found "Querelle" to be an absolutely bleak fictional reality.

Genet's writing style is unique - dense and multi-directional, someone definitely worthy of the name he has obtained. Probably a good deal underrated in the US as well. As impressed as I was, Genet failed to hook me as a reader. Other reviewers have compared Genet to Dostoevsky. I don't enjoy Dostoevsky's writing at all, so perhaps Genet just isn't my speed. Still, a great work is a great work, and I think this is at least a very good one.

I think "Querelle" is an important work, which is why I give it 4 stars despite my misgivings. I'd recommend this book to readers who are looking for something way off the beaten path. Provocative and full of texture, this book is an excellent character study and WILL excite a reaction from those readers for whom character study is a main objective.

Rating:
Summary: A brilliant acheivement, an upside down world!
Review: Genet's masterpiece is an upside down world of reverse values. Meeting Querelle through these pages is like meeting a seducing demon. His impact on nearly everyone is upheavel and disarray. He reminds the characters around him of their own shames and weaknesses, simply by being himself. Querelle is s fiendish mirror for human frailties, vanities, faults and weaknesses. Querelle's completeion is his domination by others. His peace is in full submission, his irony: those around are desparate to be possesed and dominated by him. His only friendly advances are thwarted by his passivity. A vision of a void and desparately empty character searching for the punishment he so richly deserves. If you don't understand the text , or the possibilities in the message, read Funeral Rights, or Miracle of the Rose, or better many Genet novels, his genius is deep and broad and always thought provoking.

Rating:
Summary: When Social Controls Fail
Review: Genet's Querelle de Brest is a novel that could not have been written by an American at the time of its initial publication, and probably still couldn't be today. In 2002, the book's theories and implications are still radical, and go unnoticed by the world at large, which would rather look, it seems, at anything other than the issues raised here. Querelle de Brest distorts some truths, but sees and exposes most of those it touches upon accurately.

Genet's premise is that all male-to-male social interaction--however overtly innocent or benign--is in fact a semi-conscious game of dominance and subordination that leads, under the right set of circumstances, directly towards its secretly-cherished goal of homosexual submission, violence, or, and in extreme or frustrated cases, murder. According to Genet's rules, men's heterosexual impulses are merely an adaptation resulting from severe, socially-conditioned but also spontaneous repression of an ardent, instinctive homosexual desire. Caught between equally powerful forces of desire and repression all of their adult lives, most men exist in a twilight state of continual psychological ensnarement, says Genet.

The novel takes place in the anarchic French seaport town of Brest, a liminal space that is itself symbolically semi-conscious: neither quite land or quite sea, its wharfs, dockyards, ramparts and seawalls are perpetually fog-bound; an abandoned penitentiary, the 'ancient prison' of unconsciousness that fetters the all-male population, dominates the landscape. In this Dionysian environment of hard rules, hard bodies and hard organs, the lead characters-Georges Querelle, Lieutenant Seblon, Mario, and Gil--are nonetheless simultaneously fighting themselves and one another to both avoid and become the passive or 'feminine' sexual partner.

The book's characters are largely itinerant, uneducated, and probably illiterate sailors, dockers, petty thieves, informers, and pimps; the area police are barely distinguishable from the criminal element, and mirror their psychology exactly. For all of these men, every encounter with another male, however brief, represents a veiled but unavoidable challenge for situational control and mastery. Perfectly illustrating Camille Paglia's theory that 'men are really only men when other men say they are,' the novel's characters allow themselves a slow, languid, and continuous series of retreats and advances around one another, fist-fighting until bloody and waving their [behinds] slyly at one another in turn. They mark territory, strut for each other, tease, bluff, mock and intimidate who they can, and, though infrequently allowing their 'violent emotion' and 'metaphysical hatred' to break into consciousness, satisfy their sexual urges with one another through displacement, sublimation, intoxication, extortion, coercion, or, in Querelle's case, serial murder.

Querelle is a sailor, narcissist, sociopath, and serial killer; his victims are former accomplices he needs to silence, easy targets for robbery, and 'pederasts.' But murder, the ultimate act of transgression and show of force, is also the means by which Querelle attempts to hide from himself his constantly fluctuating and continually diminishing sense of fragile identity. His knowledge of the dead men he has killed and buried, and the wealth he has stolen and hidden, represent to him not-wholly convincing evidence of his masculine superiority. The murders also act as a substitution and sublimation of his sexual desire for other men, which he continually dismisses, mocks and projects, as do all the other characters. Regardless of their own actions, sexual relationships with one another or tender feelings towards those they have partnered themselves with (macho stallion and police officer Mario thinks to himself, as he is kissed and caressed by hero-worshiping Dédé, "He's powdering me with mimosa blossoms"), the 'faggot, fairy, or auntie' is always someone other than themselves, and perpetually in disgrace.

Querelle also kills in search of a greater guilt than the one he feels in response to his emotional and sexual longing for other men, and to strike out in some fashion at the thing he most loathes within himself and desires in others.

Lone female character and brothel owner Madam Lysiane carries on a long-standing affair with Querelle's identical twin, heterosexually-identified Robert. But she becomes confused and irritated after meeting bisexual doppelganger Querelle, in whom she perceives the raw sexual power and totality that Querelle constantly searches for within himself but never finds. Lysiane lives a hazy, uncertain, and languorous existence, the feminine principal that she embodies frustrated and all but made extinct by the homosexual cloud that hangs permanently over the town.

Why are all of the men active (Norbert), self-identified (Theo, Lieutenant Seblon), latent or repressed homosexuals? Is Querelle de Brest nothing but a sustained homosexual fantasy? Is there any truth in its premises?

As Camille Paglia has said, "Whenever social controls fail, homosexuality will out," something that's a familiar fact in prison life and the history of British public schools. In the absence of women, heterosexually-identified men turn to one another for sexual satisfaction and affection with remarkable ease and completeness. It's an easily observable fact that it is the most physically masculine and virile men who enter easily into bisexual affairs (especially those who are either adventurous, fun-loving, self-secure or highly-sexed), having nothing to risk in terms of their masculine reputations by doing so, so unquestionable is their status as men in the eyes of other men. Like the cast of characters in Querelle, all they need is a pretext, a little shrewd knowledge of psychological game playing, and a quick tongue to obtain their ends.

Querelle de Brest is greatly slanted in favor of homosexuality, but beneath its surprisingly warm, human surface a paean to bisexuality--the natural key that could free men from the trap of their ensnarement and allow for emotional love among men as well as sexual freedom--can be sensed.

Rating:
Summary: An un-Christian Dostoevsky
Review: Having read, and hated, _Funeral Rites_ a few years ago, I approached _Querelle_ with diminished expectations. I was quite unprepared for its lyrical prose and complex characterization. Some of the passages from Seblon's journal flow better than any I've read in English, and Genet's metaphorical imagery is often surprising yet apt.

I often found myself reminded of my favorite novelist, Dostoevsky, while reading _Querelle_, not only for the redolent, foggy atmosphere but for the extended meditation on evil. While Dostoevsky's works concerned themselves with redemption from evil, however, in many ways Genet writes about evil (or at least criminality) as itself redemptive in some way--that is, when he isn't calling the very notion of redemption itself into question as a liberal humanist fantasy.

But what I like the most about this book is not its intellectuality, though there's plenty of that. I most enjoyed how his characters--unbelievably, even uninimaginably bizarre--became in his hands almost commonplace and real. Like Toni Morrison in a different, evil register, Genet's cast is quirky and out-there yet, somehow, not odd at all. Through their very strangeness they become the best exemplars of our real selves.

Rating:
Summary: An un-Christian Dostoevsky
Review: Having read, and hated, _Funeral Rites_ a few years ago, I approached _Querelle_ with diminished expectations. I was quite unprepared for its lyrical prose and complex characterization. Some of the passages from Seblon's journal flow better than any I've read in English, and Genet's metaphorical imagery is often surprising yet apt.

I often found myself reminded of my favorite novelist, Dostoevsky, while reading _Querelle_, not only for the redolent, foggy atmosphere but for the extended meditation on evil. While Dostoevsky's works concerned themselves with redemption from evil, however, in many ways Genet writes about evil (or at least criminality) as itself redemptive in some way--that is, when he isn't calling the very notion of redemption itself into question as a liberal humanist fantasy.

But what I like the most about this book is not its intellectuality, though there's plenty of that. I most enjoyed how his characters--unbelievably, even uninimaginably bizarre--became in his hands almost commonplace and real. Like Toni Morrison in a different, evil register, Genet's cast is quirky and out-there yet, somehow, not odd at all. Through their very strangeness they become the best exemplars of our real selves.

Rating:
Summary: A Truly Unique Fantasy
Review: Querelle is perhaps Genet's most interesting novel, indeed, it's his only novel that does not contain directly autobiographical references. Thus, it is an interesting trip into the imagination of this great thinker - and his world of fantasy is enlightening and in a strange way quite profound and poetic.

Querelle can be interpreted in many ways - but it cannot be disputed that this story is in a way about the double nature of all human beings. Readers of 'Our Lady of the Flowers' will be familiar with this rich puzzling theme. Genet creates a world, in which, the most hidden desires of men are amplified to the extent that these very desires become a personality unto themseselves. In a way these characters become prisoners to their own fantasies (much of Genet's writing has something to do with prison) and in a most tragic way. The character of Madame Lysiane, for example, is the clearest picture of this imprisonment. She is involved with the two brothers and the neglective Nono - never fully accepted or loved by any one person - she has to live a fragmented life giving parts of herself to many different people at the same time.

What makes Genet brilliant is not necesarrily just his portrait of the double, however. There is a certain inevitability in his writing. He seems to believe in a certain fate for all things. His embracing of fate consistently in his prose - makes him, like Kafka, stand out among other writers. He truly was a poet of the highest order. I would recommend starting with 'Querelle' - it is a nice introduction to Genet's work and is perhaps the easiest of all his books to get into.

Rating:
Summary: What else is there to say?
Review: 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.