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Funeral Rites
From the inside front cover: "Set at the time of the Liberation of Paris in the late summer of 1944, when the newspapers were filled with reports of massacres, fighting, and tortures, Funeral Rites revolves around the tragedy of the death of Jean Decarnin. "The funeral of Jean D.," as Genet writes in the opening pages, "brings back to my mouth the cry that left it, and its return causes me an uneasiness that is due to having found peace once again. That burial, that death, the ceremonies lock me up in a monument of murmurs, of whisperings in my ear, and of funeral exhalations. They were to make me aware of my love and friendship for Jean when the object of all that love and friendship disappeared.""
256 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1948
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3073 people want to read
About the author
Jean Genet
193 books1,231 followersJean Genet was a French novelist, playwright, poet, essayist, and political activist. In his early life he was a vagabond and petty criminal, but he later became a writer and playwright. His work, much of it considered scandalous when it first appeared, is now placed among the classics of modern literature and has been translated and performed throughout the world.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 107 reviews
September 4, 2021
A lover's death is more than a merely emotional loss: it leaves us brimming with physical desires now made unfulfillable by the lack of their object.
All the erotic attraction, sexual pulsions, secret needs that drew us toward THAT person are still there, permeating our psyche as well as our body. Death suddenly deprives them of the possibility to find their natural way out - a living body.
We might love the soul, but what we truly desire is the body. Because we are earthly creatures whose life is, as far as we can tell, a system of reactions entwined with a system of perceptions. In the evolution of mankind the psychological is a consequence, not a cause: thought was a luxury we could afford only after we got in control of the physical by becoming familiar with our anatomy and all its potential. Eroticism is the internalisation of a primal impulse - the reproductive function become self-referential. The resulting hybrid is an endogenous element whose only affordable surrogate is the assimilation of the one we love. Eroticism is the cannibalism of the soul.
Death is first and foremost the deprivation of an object. We miss the sight of our beloved more than we miss his moral convictions; we miss the sound of his voice more than we miss his idealistic views; the empty place in our bed calls for the warmth of his body, not for his artistic skills.
Loss unveils the nature of our longing, so deeply rooted in our flesh and bones that, by losing the other, we feel our own body rotting in a surplus of desire gone to waste. Loss is the grave of the living. Any attempt to keep in touch with the dead becomes a Funeral Rite.
Rites are the enactment of our deepest , darkest mental drives. Since our funda(mental) mental drives are basically sex (survival) and death (self-destruction), the logical consequence is that rites are the means for mankind to stage sex and death in order to exorcise them, first by giving them a tangible shape and then by harnessing their power in a structure of language and imagery: an incantation, or a spell.
Jean Genet's tribute to his dead lover is a spell against the death of love.
When desperation is so overwhelming that hope has nothing to lose anymore, that's when we start living again; we're born again. We're beyond desperation, resignation, rationalisation; we've been through our personal initiation to the Mystery.
Paris, August 1944: Genet's twenty-year-old lover dies during the anti-German riots, killed by the French collaborationist militia. After the burial, the grieving author is increasingly drawn toward the people who had witnessed the last days of the young partisan's life: the boy's girlfriend, who is bearing another man's child; his step-brother (a hustler, petty thief and collaborationist); his mother, whose tragic sordidness is the embodiment of a whole nation's state of mind; the German she keeps hidden in her apartment; and his imaginary murderer, whose features Genet conjures up from scratch.
From this moment on, Genet gets increasingly obsessed with the faceless, nameless militian who shed his lover's blood. He imagines him as a teenager, one of the street urchins he loves and craves for, cruel and innocent at the same time, a symbol of beauty and youth, amorality and betrayal. The murderer is therefore the ultimate embodiment of the author's conflicting desires and pulsions: since he took his victim's life, that martyred life and the killer's have merged. By possessing the murderous kid Genet snatches his beloved's soul from the claws of death and gives him a brand new physical existence.
Thus the connection is made; the living and the dead have crossed the boundaries of existence and met again.
As always in Genet, any single character in this anti-novel can morph into anybody else at the author's will; his own viewpoint changes throughout the book in a bewildering, dazzling mirror maze of voices and perspectives. There's no physical nor psychological dimension that can't be penetrated (quite literally), permeated, violated by a narrator who does more than presiding over his fictional creatures, forgetting himself, sucking the reader in, disappearing and reappearing over and over again, when and where one least expects.
The void left by the dead youth is an all-devouring emotional black hole threatening Genet's daily existence with loss, sorrow, frustrated lust, longing; all that is left of his lover is the people he got in touch with and the traces of his passage through their lives. The narrator summons them all in order to perform the esoteric funeral rites that set him free of the ghost that is haunting him. Those people are actors on a stage, existences merging into each other, shape-shifting and elusive like the memory of a dream. As in "Notre-Dame-des-Fleurs", they relentlessly love and kill and hate and fuck each other, being at the same time narrators and avatars in a world of unlimited fantasies.
A redundant warning: if you're easily offended by explicit sex and deviant eroticism, don't ever read this book.
There's a lot of sex here, mostly homosexual, mostly violent, seldom tender and often dirty. These pages are soaked in lust, both physical and mental; lust as life asserting itself in the middle of horror, after the very last hope has been silenced by bullets or grief.
If you're brave or mad enough to read this modern Book of the Dead, beware: don't ever take Jean Genet's words at face value. He will lie to you, again and again. He will take you where you don't want to go and you'll get lost in an unknown, dangerous land where all is true but nothing is real.
This is neither a novel nor a memoir. No linear narrative, no reliable confession will help you find your way out of it. You enter at your own risk.
It's not quite stream of consciousness, either; it's more about a consciousness of the stream - the stream of life and death and all there is in between.
All the erotic attraction, sexual pulsions, secret needs that drew us toward THAT person are still there, permeating our psyche as well as our body. Death suddenly deprives them of the possibility to find their natural way out - a living body.
We might love the soul, but what we truly desire is the body. Because we are earthly creatures whose life is, as far as we can tell, a system of reactions entwined with a system of perceptions. In the evolution of mankind the psychological is a consequence, not a cause: thought was a luxury we could afford only after we got in control of the physical by becoming familiar with our anatomy and all its potential. Eroticism is the internalisation of a primal impulse - the reproductive function become self-referential. The resulting hybrid is an endogenous element whose only affordable surrogate is the assimilation of the one we love. Eroticism is the cannibalism of the soul.
Death is first and foremost the deprivation of an object. We miss the sight of our beloved more than we miss his moral convictions; we miss the sound of his voice more than we miss his idealistic views; the empty place in our bed calls for the warmth of his body, not for his artistic skills.
Loss unveils the nature of our longing, so deeply rooted in our flesh and bones that, by losing the other, we feel our own body rotting in a surplus of desire gone to waste. Loss is the grave of the living. Any attempt to keep in touch with the dead becomes a Funeral Rite.
Rites are the enactment of our deepest , darkest mental drives. Since our funda(mental) mental drives are basically sex (survival) and death (self-destruction), the logical consequence is that rites are the means for mankind to stage sex and death in order to exorcise them, first by giving them a tangible shape and then by harnessing their power in a structure of language and imagery: an incantation, or a spell.
Jean Genet's tribute to his dead lover is a spell against the death of love.
When desperation is so overwhelming that hope has nothing to lose anymore, that's when we start living again; we're born again. We're beyond desperation, resignation, rationalisation; we've been through our personal initiation to the Mystery.
Paris, August 1944: Genet's twenty-year-old lover dies during the anti-German riots, killed by the French collaborationist militia. After the burial, the grieving author is increasingly drawn toward the people who had witnessed the last days of the young partisan's life: the boy's girlfriend, who is bearing another man's child; his step-brother (a hustler, petty thief and collaborationist); his mother, whose tragic sordidness is the embodiment of a whole nation's state of mind; the German she keeps hidden in her apartment; and his imaginary murderer, whose features Genet conjures up from scratch.
From this moment on, Genet gets increasingly obsessed with the faceless, nameless militian who shed his lover's blood. He imagines him as a teenager, one of the street urchins he loves and craves for, cruel and innocent at the same time, a symbol of beauty and youth, amorality and betrayal. The murderer is therefore the ultimate embodiment of the author's conflicting desires and pulsions: since he took his victim's life, that martyred life and the killer's have merged. By possessing the murderous kid Genet snatches his beloved's soul from the claws of death and gives him a brand new physical existence.
Thus the connection is made; the living and the dead have crossed the boundaries of existence and met again.
As always in Genet, any single character in this anti-novel can morph into anybody else at the author's will; his own viewpoint changes throughout the book in a bewildering, dazzling mirror maze of voices and perspectives. There's no physical nor psychological dimension that can't be penetrated (quite literally), permeated, violated by a narrator who does more than presiding over his fictional creatures, forgetting himself, sucking the reader in, disappearing and reappearing over and over again, when and where one least expects.
The void left by the dead youth is an all-devouring emotional black hole threatening Genet's daily existence with loss, sorrow, frustrated lust, longing; all that is left of his lover is the people he got in touch with and the traces of his passage through their lives. The narrator summons them all in order to perform the esoteric funeral rites that set him free of the ghost that is haunting him. Those people are actors on a stage, existences merging into each other, shape-shifting and elusive like the memory of a dream. As in "Notre-Dame-des-Fleurs", they relentlessly love and kill and hate and fuck each other, being at the same time narrators and avatars in a world of unlimited fantasies.
A redundant warning: if you're easily offended by explicit sex and deviant eroticism, don't ever read this book.
There's a lot of sex here, mostly homosexual, mostly violent, seldom tender and often dirty. These pages are soaked in lust, both physical and mental; lust as life asserting itself in the middle of horror, after the very last hope has been silenced by bullets or grief.
If you're brave or mad enough to read this modern Book of the Dead, beware: don't ever take Jean Genet's words at face value. He will lie to you, again and again. He will take you where you don't want to go and you'll get lost in an unknown, dangerous land where all is true but nothing is real.
This is neither a novel nor a memoir. No linear narrative, no reliable confession will help you find your way out of it. You enter at your own risk.
It's not quite stream of consciousness, either; it's more about a consciousness of the stream - the stream of life and death and all there is in between.
June 24, 2025
Devastating and poetic. A work of dark and obscene beauty that looks at pain and loss, Nazis, eroticism, and, more than anything else, a great bitterness. Reads a bit like a surreal sex fantasy, but at its core is a powerful memorial to Genet's Resistance fighter lover, Jean Decarnin, murdered by the Germans during WW2. Gave me a right good wallop in the head, the heart, and the guts. Surely one of the best pieces of gay literature to come out of France in the 20th century. It wasn't all dominated by male flesh though, and if anything; despite an unforgettably brutal Nazi lieutenant, it was Decarnin's female lover, a maid called Juliette, that became the most thought about character. Haven't read his most popular work Our Lady of the Flowers yet, but much preferred this to The Thief's Journal
June 26, 2025
ثمانون صفحة من اللاشيء تكفي.. هذه الرواية ليست لي...
June 6, 2008
One of the great works of twentieth century literature. Does anyone know why the Bernard Frechtman translation is abridged, omitting crucial scenes? I have the Black Cat press version, published '69, maybe the Grove Press rectifies the wrong.
Genet's life project was to lift the poisionous veil of bourgeois/religious values from sexual love, in some of the most lyrical passages ever written in French prose.
Most of this book is a series of sexual encounters between French resistance fighters, Nazis, and Genet himself, whose contempt for French society allows a curiously apolitical view of the historical events depicted. Genet mourns his fallen soldiers by writing himself through a series of violent sex dreams, resurrecting the dead on both sides of the barracades in an attempt to exorcise the trauma of his own long incarceration. It is impossible not to be horrified and equally impossible to reject Genet for reasons of immorality, although I suppose to most 21st century readers are too glib and detached and politically correct to experience in any way the power of this difficult novel.
Genet's life project was to lift the poisionous veil of bourgeois/religious values from sexual love, in some of the most lyrical passages ever written in French prose.
Most of this book is a series of sexual encounters between French resistance fighters, Nazis, and Genet himself, whose contempt for French society allows a curiously apolitical view of the historical events depicted. Genet mourns his fallen soldiers by writing himself through a series of violent sex dreams, resurrecting the dead on both sides of the barracades in an attempt to exorcise the trauma of his own long incarceration. It is impossible not to be horrified and equally impossible to reject Genet for reasons of immorality, although I suppose to most 21st century readers are too glib and detached and politically correct to experience in any way the power of this difficult novel.
December 24, 2023
It's not easy reading--Genet never is and this is him at his most difficult, his daring you the hardest to judge him. But I needed this right now.
January 4, 2021
I believe I was halfway through the scene of Hitler getting his ass eaten out by a twink-ish teenage turncoat, when a coworker inquired about the nature of the book I was so studiously reading on my break…I fumbled…I muttered something akin to “Oh you know…it’s about the German occupation of Paris in WWII” which is a bit like describing the Bible “as a bunch of Jews out wandering the desert.” And so it was that I returned to the fetid anal cavity of Jean Genet after a 5 year leave of absence…I had been quite the fanatic in high school when such a wretched mixture of continental poetry and perversity seemed like just the right antidote to suburban American conservatism…Oh such simpler times indeed. I was eager to see how my opinion on Genet’s work had evolved some three hundred or so books later…And oddly enough it really hasn’t. The same things both enrapture, annoy, and slightly embarrass me about his swampy-fen of prose-poetry. It’s frightening moments of lucidity still grip me like a slightly aroused fever dream, though all too often it becomes mired in narrative obscurity and near juvenile passages of moral depravity…Now don’t get me wrong Our Lady of The Flowers is still one of the greatest works of 20th century queer fiction, it’s just that everything Genet wrote following that book feels like a stylistic retread of sorts (which isn’t to say theyre bad books, far from it)…I had thought Funeral Rites, seeing as its arguably Genet’s most fictionalized narrative would present me with something radically different within the generalized boundaries of that formula…unfortunately it feel almost like pastiche. Gay Nazis, fascism as a political expression of sadomasochism, sex and death, Nietzschean subversion of morality…If you’ve ever listened to a Death in June album you’ll get the idea…
Funeral Rites follows our narrator (a fictional Jean Genet) as he attends the funeral procession of his twink lover, a communist revolutionary also named Jean. While the procession takes place the novel careens both forward and backward in time to trace out a weirdly fanatical gay love quadrangle (or whatever the fuck you call it) between a Nazi executioner, Jean’s brother Paulo (the one who rimmed Hitler), Joan of Arc (at one point), another sexy gay Nazi named Eric, and Riton a spindly spit fuck Nazi collaborator. All of these characters’ various plots and subplots fall across one another like cardiac arrest victims at a geriatric orgy…It’s hard to keep track of it all, as the sex and violence gets more and more surreal as the proverbial heat in the pressure cooker of Genet’s prose becomes almost comically bent under the weight of its adjective laden excess. In short, describing this book’s plot is a bit beside the point. It’s not about what happens, it’s the way Genet is able take horrific acts of depravity and turn them on their head, into almost wholesome scenes of love (and vice versa). Upheaval pervades all things in the world of Genet, especially in yer feckin pants…
So what about the prose itself…Well I’m kind of torn. It doesn’t hold up as well as I remember it being, maybe this is a bad translation or just an inferior work…But it struck me as oddly clunky and laughably melodramatic at points…Kinda like Rimbaud, very emotional and violent in that juvenile particularly French way. It reminds of me of how I used to write, everything taken to a gruesome excess, which isn’t to say it’s unreadable. I would still vastly prefer Genet over Burroughs or any of the other beat-nik posers who copped his style and thematic propensity toward obscenity etc. I just feel that there are writers who do this kinda thing in a more subdued and intellectual fashion…Christ maybe I’m just getting old….
All in all if you are new to Genet I wouldn’t start here, the man had one hell of a life going from an imprisoned gay vagrant to one of France’s most respected intellectuals and political activists…Thus I’d start with a work that hits more close to the autobiographical marrow like the aforementioned Our Lady of The Flowers or The Thief’s Journal…Though if ya have a hankering for some steamy n raunchtastic Nazi on Commie sex fantasy…Then by all means…Get to eating ya filthy animals!
3.5/5
Funeral Rites follows our narrator (a fictional Jean Genet) as he attends the funeral procession of his twink lover, a communist revolutionary also named Jean. While the procession takes place the novel careens both forward and backward in time to trace out a weirdly fanatical gay love quadrangle (or whatever the fuck you call it) between a Nazi executioner, Jean’s brother Paulo (the one who rimmed Hitler), Joan of Arc (at one point), another sexy gay Nazi named Eric, and Riton a spindly spit fuck Nazi collaborator. All of these characters’ various plots and subplots fall across one another like cardiac arrest victims at a geriatric orgy…It’s hard to keep track of it all, as the sex and violence gets more and more surreal as the proverbial heat in the pressure cooker of Genet’s prose becomes almost comically bent under the weight of its adjective laden excess. In short, describing this book’s plot is a bit beside the point. It’s not about what happens, it’s the way Genet is able take horrific acts of depravity and turn them on their head, into almost wholesome scenes of love (and vice versa). Upheaval pervades all things in the world of Genet, especially in yer feckin pants…
So what about the prose itself…Well I’m kind of torn. It doesn’t hold up as well as I remember it being, maybe this is a bad translation or just an inferior work…But it struck me as oddly clunky and laughably melodramatic at points…Kinda like Rimbaud, very emotional and violent in that juvenile particularly French way. It reminds of me of how I used to write, everything taken to a gruesome excess, which isn’t to say it’s unreadable. I would still vastly prefer Genet over Burroughs or any of the other beat-nik posers who copped his style and thematic propensity toward obscenity etc. I just feel that there are writers who do this kinda thing in a more subdued and intellectual fashion…Christ maybe I’m just getting old….
All in all if you are new to Genet I wouldn’t start here, the man had one hell of a life going from an imprisoned gay vagrant to one of France’s most respected intellectuals and political activists…Thus I’d start with a work that hits more close to the autobiographical marrow like the aforementioned Our Lady of The Flowers or The Thief’s Journal…Though if ya have a hankering for some steamy n raunchtastic Nazi on Commie sex fantasy…Then by all means…Get to eating ya filthy animals!
3.5/5
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November 18, 2015...when I returned alone from the morgue, darkness had set in. As I walked up the Rue de la Chausée-d'Antin, swimming on waves of sadness and grief and thinking about death, I raised my head and saw a huge stone angel, dark as night, looming up at the end of the street. Three seconds later, I realized it was the bulk of the Church of the Trinity, but for three seconds I had felt the horror of my condition, of my poor helplessness in the presence of what seemed in the darkness (and less in the August darkness of Paris than in the thicker darkness of my dismal thoughts) to be the angel of death and death itself, both of them as unyielding as a rock. And a moment ago, when writing the word "Hitlerian," in which Hitler is contained, it was the Church of the Trinity, dark and formless enough to look like the eagle of the Reich, that I saw moving toward me. For a very brief instant, I relived the three seconds in which it was as if I were petrified, appallingly attracted by those stones, the horror of which I felt but from which my trapped gaze could not flee. I felt it was evil to gaze in that way, with that insistence and that abandon, yet I kept gazing. It is not yet the moment for me to know whether the Führer of the Germans is, in general, to personify death, but I shall speak of him, inspired by my love for Jean, for his soldiers, and perhaps shall learn what secret role they play in my heart.So but it's not just the repetition (it will be repeated again repeatedly) of "three seconds" that cues one into something being off. It's also all that "waves of sadness and grief" and "dark as night" and "looming up" and "the horror of my condition" and "my poor helplessness" and “the thicker darkness of my dismal thoughts” and “unyielding as a rock” and “dark and formless enough...” and (“three seconds” again make six) and “appallingly attracted” and “the horror” (enough “horror” already with your mid-cent=French!) and “my trapped gaze could not flee” and “I felt” and “to gaze” and “I kept gazing” (another magic word, “gaze”; thanks Sartre) and “to personify death” and “inspired by my love for Jean” and “in my heart” and and and and and.
So you see what I mean. Strike one :: First Person PoV (which is slightly ameliorated (because it has to be ameliorated) by Our Narrator Jean Genet imagining himself into other characters (both rapists and rapees) and thus gaining a pronomial shift and instability)---; Strike two :: wooden prose. Frankly, either it improved later in the book (not really) or like a frog in tepid water I just got used to it, caught up in the thrill of the romance (probably, likely). Because it’s kind of just a romance. Strike three is avoided because the thing is structured intelligently enough ; intelligently enough that one’s not really exactly sure whether it’s just another romance with a political background and some scatology thrown in or a scatological novel about war which besmears its lovers or a political tale spiced up with some shit and some sex. So, not a total loss, but poor Genet doesn’t do well in this Englishing without some non-artistic excuses and special licensing.
July 12, 2024
My first contact with Genet was a glimpse of the cover of this book sighted at a used book store. The cover shot of Genet, forlorn with his hands in his pockets, somehow caused a ping on the brand-new gaydar.
I bought the book, and read it, and read it a few more times, and then always looked for more. Oh, Genet, I still chuckle thinking of you on assignment from Esquire being sent to Chicago to cover the 1968 Democratic National Convention and hanging out with the Black Panthers. Remember— you had to sneak into the US from Canada.
None of that is in this typically hallucinatory book of course, but still, one can't think of handsome criminals being punished and executed all day. Can you?
I bought the book, and read it, and read it a few more times, and then always looked for more. Oh, Genet, I still chuckle thinking of you on assignment from Esquire being sent to Chicago to cover the 1968 Democratic National Convention and hanging out with the Black Panthers. Remember— you had to sneak into the US from Canada.
None of that is in this typically hallucinatory book of course, but still, one can't think of handsome criminals being punished and executed all day. Can you?
March 30, 2017
Funeral Rites by Jean Genet (Grove Press, trans. by Frechtman, 1969)
This, Genet's last novel, is my favourite of the five. So much so that I adapted it into a play that so far has never been staged. The story is brilliant, sadistic and horrific, and the writing luminous, finding its voice in the richly resonant theatre of World War II, as the narrator mourns the death of his young lover at the hands of French traitors while Paris is being liberated from the Germans. With its inverted Catholicism and decadent symbolism, it's as much a kick in the teeth of Nazism as of religion and conventional mores. And while it might seem hard for even a practiced rebel and flouter of convention to appear more outrageous than the war's atrocities, Genet is equal to the task, embodying and desecrating even Hitler in the course of his narrative, which climaxes with a cannibalistic ritual in which the flesh of his dead lover serves as a host-like corpus amoris.
Genet's books were among the first gay material available to me as a teenager (purchased at the Mic Mac Mall in Dartmouth, no less) and the timing was perfect. In my state of closeted teenage hormonal overdrive, nothing in his work shocked me or seemed outrageous, as great writing—which to me refutes any moral arguments against it—supports it. This is a work to savour. His prose is as emotionally effervescent as a Mahler symphony, while at the same time as densely satisfying and profoundly complex as anything by Schoenberg.
This, Genet's last novel, is my favourite of the five. So much so that I adapted it into a play that so far has never been staged. The story is brilliant, sadistic and horrific, and the writing luminous, finding its voice in the richly resonant theatre of World War II, as the narrator mourns the death of his young lover at the hands of French traitors while Paris is being liberated from the Germans. With its inverted Catholicism and decadent symbolism, it's as much a kick in the teeth of Nazism as of religion and conventional mores. And while it might seem hard for even a practiced rebel and flouter of convention to appear more outrageous than the war's atrocities, Genet is equal to the task, embodying and desecrating even Hitler in the course of his narrative, which climaxes with a cannibalistic ritual in which the flesh of his dead lover serves as a host-like corpus amoris.
Genet's books were among the first gay material available to me as a teenager (purchased at the Mic Mac Mall in Dartmouth, no less) and the timing was perfect. In my state of closeted teenage hormonal overdrive, nothing in his work shocked me or seemed outrageous, as great writing—which to me refutes any moral arguments against it—supports it. This is a work to savour. His prose is as emotionally effervescent as a Mahler symphony, while at the same time as densely satisfying and profoundly complex as anything by Schoenberg.
September 30, 2025
I don't know if Genet reverberates with readers gay or straight as he did for people of my generation (and I am not contemporary with Genet - I am old, nut this novel was published before I was born. Indeed seeing that original publication date of 1948 I am astounded - what did we have in English to rival it in 1948. Not simply in 'gay' terms and Genet being French really doesn't fit into the anglophone worlds understanding of a 'gay' person never mind a writer. In a sense this novel could be the grand-daddy of all transgressive novels. It fits right in with Dennis Cooper's oeuvre in its shocking disregard for the pieties of society.
This novel is brilliant and a must read in the way James Purdy must be read. It is also a great introduction to Genet and possibly his most accessible work, but not his most comfortable!
This novel is brilliant and a must read in the way James Purdy must be read. It is also a great introduction to Genet and possibly his most accessible work, but not his most comfortable!
April 25, 2023
this book was less of a story and more of an….. experience? technically there is a plot but i really feel the point is to simply evoke a series of feelings. not sure if this makes sense, will try to clarify with the rest of this review
to cite the washington post quote on the back of my copy, this is “quite possibly an evil book.” definitely one of the more insane things i have read in a dark, disturbing sense. would put it up there alongside blood meridian in terms of just absolutely base human behavior, though far less gory. would put it up there alongside the sound in the fury in terms of whirlwind confusion / generally disturbed atmosphere, though a bit more comprehensible.
what i did not enjoy about this book is unfortunately what i believe makes it so unique (and in some ways, SOME, powerful). for me, it was nearly impossible to understand from a purely plot-focused point of view. i felt like i was being gaslit by this novel at first, seriously. the way it is structured resembles that of a normal book just enough to lull you into a false sense of security, which is why i said its more comprehensible than s&f. HOWEVER, genet constantly switches back and forth between perspectives and stories and reality and his own imagination and the imagination of others. it is so, so difficult to have a basic understanding of the events, and what order they happen in, and to who they are happening. i think the lack of chapters threw me off more than anticipated. it was simply too much for me. that being said, i can appreciate how the chaos mirrors what the narrator appears to be experiencing in his own head. there is also something to the total incomprehensibility of the basic events forcing the reader to surrender to pure instinctual emotional reaction, you dig? am i making sense? clearly genet’s writing has rubbed off on me.
this book has some really horrific scenes that had me literally cringing (i.e. riton and the cat, the maid at the burial, what happens to riton toward the end at the apartment), so that is a W. i love a good intense response to the written word. aside from that, genet really indulges in the grossness of basic human function. way more detailed descriptions of farts and murky rear ends than i would have anticipated, adds a lot to the whole life is terrible all humans are terrible sort of situation. i think i found the maids character to be the most devastating, she feels totally detached from the world of the narrator and everyone around her. i could say a lot about being a woman right now but this review is already getting lengthy
"She saw herself at the end of her rope, that is, on the point of flying away from the earth once and for all. And that grief which transcended itself was due not only to her daughter's death, it was the sum of all her miseries as a woman and her miseries as a housemaid, of all the human miseries that overwhelmed her that day because a ceremony, which, moreover, was meant to do so, had extracted all those miseries from her person in which they were scattered."
one of my favorite aspects of this book was how the narrator processed the grief over the death of his lover. the whole idea of him (the narrator) feeling as though he “contains” the deceased jean in a way is so, so heartbreaking. i’ve never experienced this specific breed of pain, but i think this is a book i will have to return to if i ever do. i anticipated the book revolving more around this grief, i think the development of all these separate story lines (jean, erik, riton, the maid, etc…) detracted from the possibility of a more moving commentary on mourning / book overall
"But Jean will live through me. I shall lend him my body. Through me he will act, will think. Through my eyes he will see the stars, the scarves of women and their breasts. I am taking on a very grave role. A soul is in purgatory and I am offering it my body. It is with the same emotion that an actor approaches the character whom he will make visi-ble. My spouse may be less wretched. A sleeping soul hopes for a body; may the one that the actor assumes for an evening be beautiful. This is no small matter."
another paris book off the list, though i will say this one did not really feel like a true “paris book.” though the setting is obviously integral to the story in a historic sense, the city does not seem to play all that big of a role in a more aesthetic / emotional sense, the way is did in giovannis room, the paris wife, etc
i have to say i am happy to be done, this one dragged for a bit. interesting twist at the end though. need a break from genet but open to him again in the future.
long quotes
"Ever since I began writing this book, which is completely devoted to the cult of a dead person with whom I am living on intimate terms, I have been feeling a kind of excitement which, cloaked by the alibi of Jean's glory, has been plunging me into a more and more intense and more and more desperate life, that has been impelling me to greater boldness. And I feel I have the strength not only to commit bolder burglaries but also to affront fearlessly the noblest human institutions in order to destroy them. I'm drunk with life, with violence, with despair."
"Behind the simple door that one opens perhaps there awakes a dragon whose body coils round itself several times. If you look a dog in the eye too intently, it may recite an astounding poem to you. You might have been mad for a long time and have realized it only at that moment. Is there perhaps a snake in the bag hanging from the coatrack? Beware. From the slightest patch of shadow, from a spot of darkness, there rise up prowlers armed to the teeth who tie you up and carry you off."
"(Do you know the amusing physical experiment in which a ring that hangs from a thread is supported after the thread is burned? The thread is soaked in very salty water. The ring is then tied to it. Then you burn the thread with a match. The ring stays up, supported by the delicate cord of salt.) Erik felt he was composed of a skeleton as breakable and white as that cord, which was traversed by a shudder from one particle of salt to the next, also like a chain composed of doddering old men."
to cite the washington post quote on the back of my copy, this is “quite possibly an evil book.” definitely one of the more insane things i have read in a dark, disturbing sense. would put it up there alongside blood meridian in terms of just absolutely base human behavior, though far less gory. would put it up there alongside the sound in the fury in terms of whirlwind confusion / generally disturbed atmosphere, though a bit more comprehensible.
what i did not enjoy about this book is unfortunately what i believe makes it so unique (and in some ways, SOME, powerful). for me, it was nearly impossible to understand from a purely plot-focused point of view. i felt like i was being gaslit by this novel at first, seriously. the way it is structured resembles that of a normal book just enough to lull you into a false sense of security, which is why i said its more comprehensible than s&f. HOWEVER, genet constantly switches back and forth between perspectives and stories and reality and his own imagination and the imagination of others. it is so, so difficult to have a basic understanding of the events, and what order they happen in, and to who they are happening. i think the lack of chapters threw me off more than anticipated. it was simply too much for me. that being said, i can appreciate how the chaos mirrors what the narrator appears to be experiencing in his own head. there is also something to the total incomprehensibility of the basic events forcing the reader to surrender to pure instinctual emotional reaction, you dig? am i making sense? clearly genet’s writing has rubbed off on me.
this book has some really horrific scenes that had me literally cringing (i.e. riton and the cat, the maid at the burial, what happens to riton toward the end at the apartment), so that is a W. i love a good intense response to the written word. aside from that, genet really indulges in the grossness of basic human function. way more detailed descriptions of farts and murky rear ends than i would have anticipated, adds a lot to the whole life is terrible all humans are terrible sort of situation. i think i found the maids character to be the most devastating, she feels totally detached from the world of the narrator and everyone around her. i could say a lot about being a woman right now but this review is already getting lengthy
"She saw herself at the end of her rope, that is, on the point of flying away from the earth once and for all. And that grief which transcended itself was due not only to her daughter's death, it was the sum of all her miseries as a woman and her miseries as a housemaid, of all the human miseries that overwhelmed her that day because a ceremony, which, moreover, was meant to do so, had extracted all those miseries from her person in which they were scattered."
one of my favorite aspects of this book was how the narrator processed the grief over the death of his lover. the whole idea of him (the narrator) feeling as though he “contains” the deceased jean in a way is so, so heartbreaking. i’ve never experienced this specific breed of pain, but i think this is a book i will have to return to if i ever do. i anticipated the book revolving more around this grief, i think the development of all these separate story lines (jean, erik, riton, the maid, etc…) detracted from the possibility of a more moving commentary on mourning / book overall
"But Jean will live through me. I shall lend him my body. Through me he will act, will think. Through my eyes he will see the stars, the scarves of women and their breasts. I am taking on a very grave role. A soul is in purgatory and I am offering it my body. It is with the same emotion that an actor approaches the character whom he will make visi-ble. My spouse may be less wretched. A sleeping soul hopes for a body; may the one that the actor assumes for an evening be beautiful. This is no small matter."
another paris book off the list, though i will say this one did not really feel like a true “paris book.” though the setting is obviously integral to the story in a historic sense, the city does not seem to play all that big of a role in a more aesthetic / emotional sense, the way is did in giovannis room, the paris wife, etc
i have to say i am happy to be done, this one dragged for a bit. interesting twist at the end though. need a break from genet but open to him again in the future.
long quotes
"Ever since I began writing this book, which is completely devoted to the cult of a dead person with whom I am living on intimate terms, I have been feeling a kind of excitement which, cloaked by the alibi of Jean's glory, has been plunging me into a more and more intense and more and more desperate life, that has been impelling me to greater boldness. And I feel I have the strength not only to commit bolder burglaries but also to affront fearlessly the noblest human institutions in order to destroy them. I'm drunk with life, with violence, with despair."
"Behind the simple door that one opens perhaps there awakes a dragon whose body coils round itself several times. If you look a dog in the eye too intently, it may recite an astounding poem to you. You might have been mad for a long time and have realized it only at that moment. Is there perhaps a snake in the bag hanging from the coatrack? Beware. From the slightest patch of shadow, from a spot of darkness, there rise up prowlers armed to the teeth who tie you up and carry you off."
"(Do you know the amusing physical experiment in which a ring that hangs from a thread is supported after the thread is burned? The thread is soaked in very salty water. The ring is then tied to it. Then you burn the thread with a match. The ring stays up, supported by the delicate cord of salt.) Erik felt he was composed of a skeleton as breakable and white as that cord, which was traversed by a shudder from one particle of salt to the next, also like a chain composed of doddering old men."
August 15, 2023
(مذهل مدى السرعة التى تتدفق بها الكلمات من القلم لتحدد طبائع معينة وما أشد السعادة التي يشعر بها المؤلف لكونه قادرا على التكلم بهذه الطريقة عن أبطاله)
August 1, 2022
My first Genet. Tremendously challenging at times—both in terms of content and of form—but also terribly beautiful, painful, cruel, awe-inspiring. I need to mull it over before a longer review. It’s not the type of book one can process immediately after finishing.
Reread from July 27th to August 1st, 2022: So much richer upon reread, although still nearly impossible to discuss in plain language. I’d place it in my top five novels, I think.
Reread from July 27th to August 1st, 2022: So much richer upon reread, although still nearly impossible to discuss in plain language. I’d place it in my top five novels, I think.
Read
October 4, 2025Der minderjährige Geliebte des Erzählers wurde auf Geheiß der deutschen Besatzer exekutiert. Am aufgebahrten Leichnam entspinnt sich ein Gedanken- und Phantasiekarussel, das oftmals schwer auszuhalten ist: Gewalt und Brutaltät, Unterdrückung und Mord, die Nazis und die Resistance (die sich wie ein Schwanz aus dem Gestrüpp erhebt) das absolut Böse werden im Sinne eines erotischen Machtspiels aufgeladen und überschrieben. Faszinierend und verstörend zu lesen, entzieht sich Genets Totenfest einer Beurteilung zwischen 1 und 5 Sternen.
July 13, 2025
incroyable jtm genet
February 11, 2008
Mourning is the gesture of recognition to the collapse of a lesser solar system. Genet is a shape shifter and this novel is a map of those people affected by, or related to the death of his lover. In order to cope with his grief, he imagines the interiors of the cast of souls related to the departed, among them the executioner, in Nazi occupied France. Genet veers from perspective to perspective, unannounced, desperately searching for a form or a logic of behavior where there has been left a void. Like a series of mirrors the novel folds and unfolds. Tying himself to every element, he suggests the possibility for empathy through narcissism. By seeing his own face in the faces of his lover, his lover's executioner, the soldiers lying quietly on the roofs of Paris, he is able to possess them.
August 14, 2021
My second Genet. Agonizingly beautiful. Can be a challenge to read, but is so worth it.
July 5, 2024
La segunda gran guerra ha finalizado en una Europa cuyo caracter civilizado todavía no se ha recuperado del todo. Francia se afana en purgar las manchas infligidas a su honor durante el régimen de Vichy pero también a llorarle y honrar a aquellos que se resistieron y dieron su vida por tal causa. Entre estos últimos se encuentra el que fuera amante de nuestro narrador -el propio escritor- que será en adelante nuestros ojos, nuestra boca, nuestro sexo y sobre todo, nuestro sentir por el que discurrirán tiernos recuerdos, negros lamentos, ensoñaciones y deseos.
Los colaboracionistas -fuese por motivos ideológicos o sobre todo circunstanciales- con el antiguo régimen son perseguidos incluso con más vehemencia que los propios alemanes, son tratados como traidores a su patria. Genet, que procede del lumpen más barriobajero, de convivir y formar parte de esos eternos parias, delicuentes, chaperos, presidiarios… se situa naturalmente al lado de los repudiados. Uno de ellos es hermano del amante caído. Otro, un jovenzuelo que el autor descubre en una filmación realizada por los vencedores con fines propagandísticos.
Para completar el elenco de personajes(?) sobre el que se apoya toda la novela, el alemán amante de la madre del amante caído -perdón por el juego de palabras- entra en juego. El dolor y los deseos más profundos hacen el resto para sumergirnos en un vendaval donde confluyen realidad, delirios y fantasías con altas -y sobre todo bajas- pasiones que nos arrastra a lo largo de las casi trescientas páginas que conforman esta novela.
La prosa de Genet no me ha resultado fácil, capaz como es, de conjugar imágenes de cegadora belleza con pasajes sórdidos y crueles en ocasiones simultáneamente. Es obsesiva -la novela no hace pausas ni divisiones en capítulos- al traducir sus sentimientos de pérdida y desesperación en multitud de escenas usualmente muy perturbadoras -crueles, a veces- que van intercalándose sobre un trasfondo fúnebre -La casa de Bernarda Alba meets porno gonzo, si quieren- en un teatro sexual que llega al paroxismo durante un encuentro sexual entre el Führer alemán y uno de los jóvenes milicianos donde el autor -y el lector con él- llega a adoptar distintos roles dentro de la misma escena.
Recomendable para quien guste de sublimes sentimientos y sórdidas realidades en armonía.
Los colaboracionistas -fuese por motivos ideológicos o sobre todo circunstanciales- con el antiguo régimen son perseguidos incluso con más vehemencia que los propios alemanes, son tratados como traidores a su patria. Genet, que procede del lumpen más barriobajero, de convivir y formar parte de esos eternos parias, delicuentes, chaperos, presidiarios… se situa naturalmente al lado de los repudiados. Uno de ellos es hermano del amante caído. Otro, un jovenzuelo que el autor descubre en una filmación realizada por los vencedores con fines propagandísticos.
Para completar el elenco de personajes(?) sobre el que se apoya toda la novela, el alemán amante de la madre del amante caído -perdón por el juego de palabras- entra en juego. El dolor y los deseos más profundos hacen el resto para sumergirnos en un vendaval donde confluyen realidad, delirios y fantasías con altas -y sobre todo bajas- pasiones que nos arrastra a lo largo de las casi trescientas páginas que conforman esta novela.
La prosa de Genet no me ha resultado fácil, capaz como es, de conjugar imágenes de cegadora belleza con pasajes sórdidos y crueles en ocasiones simultáneamente. Es obsesiva -la novela no hace pausas ni divisiones en capítulos- al traducir sus sentimientos de pérdida y desesperación en multitud de escenas usualmente muy perturbadoras -crueles, a veces- que van intercalándose sobre un trasfondo fúnebre -La casa de Bernarda Alba meets porno gonzo, si quieren- en un teatro sexual que llega al paroxismo durante un encuentro sexual entre el Führer alemán y uno de los jóvenes milicianos donde el autor -y el lector con él- llega a adoptar distintos roles dentro de la misma escena.
Recomendable para quien guste de sublimes sentimientos y sórdidas realidades en armonía.
February 2, 2011
If I were to base my rating off of literary talent alone, this book deserves more stars than are available. However, I'm only giving it three stars because aside from the stellar prose, I really didn't care for Funeral Rites.
It's a bit confusing. The first half reminded me a bit of Sebold's Austerlitz due to the lack of "easy" breaks.
The stream of consciousness makes Genet's prose at times difficult to follow. There were times I had to flip back to understand the shifts from present action to past action to fantasy to details presented from a first-person narrative in which I think Genet was putting himself into another character's shoes to share their portion of the tale. I say think because I'm still not 100% sure.
Funeral Rites is for the philosophical intellectual or anyone on hallucinatory drugs. It would probably also be appealing to anyone with intense anal fetishes.
I dig the intensity although I found it flamboyant and overly dramatic at times.
It's a bit confusing. The first half reminded me a bit of Sebold's Austerlitz due to the lack of "easy" breaks.
The stream of consciousness makes Genet's prose at times difficult to follow. There were times I had to flip back to understand the shifts from present action to past action to fantasy to details presented from a first-person narrative in which I think Genet was putting himself into another character's shoes to share their portion of the tale. I say think because I'm still not 100% sure.
Funeral Rites is for the philosophical intellectual or anyone on hallucinatory drugs. It would probably also be appealing to anyone with intense anal fetishes.
I dig the intensity although I found it flamboyant and overly dramatic at times.
June 28, 2019
Jean Genet set a magnificent precedent, you cannot deny his genius ❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️ Neil Bartlett’s introduction to Funeral Rites was spot on , he too is my hero !
February 5, 2021
Very similar to “Jojo Rabbit”
October 25, 2025
Mi libro favorito de mi autor favorito. Excesivo, pomposo, pero tan genial que se le perdona todo.
May 14, 2016
في المدرسة حصل جان جينيه على اعلى درجة في كتابة موضوع إنشائي من بين زملائه جميعا واحتفل فيه المدرس وقرأ موضوعه على الطلاب وفيما هو يمتدح قدرات الفتى الصغير الانشائية قفز احد الطلبة وقال بصوت عالي : ولكن يا سيدي ان جان لَقيط ... سكت المدرس وتفاجئ ولم يكمل مديحه سكت لان جان كان لقيطا ...
عند دخول القوات الألمانية الغازية باريس فرح جينيه وقال تعالو ودمروا باريس ودمروا كل من احتقرني ...
جان جينية اللقيط اللص المجرم اللوطي الشاعر يكتب بلغة مكثفة وبأسلوب غريب و بذيئ روايته ( شعائر الجنازة )
تأبينا مختلفا و صادم لعشيقه المقاوم جان د ...
كتاب غامض يتداخل الجنس والموت بأسلوب خاص
هو اُسلوب الذي كتب عنه سارتر مجلدا بعنوان ( القديس المتشرد ) اُسلوب جان جينيه المتفرد ..
كتاب لا انصح الكل بقراءته
عند دخول القوات الألمانية الغازية باريس فرح جينيه وقال تعالو ودمروا باريس ودمروا كل من احتقرني ...
جان جينية اللقيط اللص المجرم اللوطي الشاعر يكتب بلغة مكثفة وبأسلوب غريب و بذيئ روايته ( شعائر الجنازة )
تأبينا مختلفا و صادم لعشيقه المقاوم جان د ...
كتاب غامض يتداخل الجنس والموت بأسلوب خاص
هو اُسلوب الذي كتب عنه سارتر مجلدا بعنوان ( القديس المتشرد ) اُسلوب جان جينيه المتفرد ..
كتاب لا انصح الكل بقراءته
November 4, 2025
Jean Genet is full of mad grief and love, and lust... mourning Jean D. intensely, seeing him everywhere, wanting to devour him and digest him to make him part of you so he can stay in the world, feeling incredibly empty and frustrated and lustful. He says by losing something you're made aware of just how much you love it, so he should be thankful to Jean's killer...
The characters, based on the people he meets, in the stories he tells mirror his intense grief and love, but they're also full of an erotic love for the strong and the evil that doesn't resonate with me. It doesn't put me off particularly much, but a lot of evil stuff really just doesn't resonate. I'm not sure what to make of a number of things, but in the end, love, grief, and betrayal come out most strongly of all.
The characters, based on the people he meets, in the stories he tells mirror his intense grief and love, but they're also full of an erotic love for the strong and the evil that doesn't resonate with me. It doesn't put me off particularly much, but a lot of evil stuff really just doesn't resonate. I'm not sure what to make of a number of things, but in the end, love, grief, and betrayal come out most strongly of all.
May 23, 2025
No irónicamente, puede que sea una de las novelas más bellas que he leído para escribir la tesis (y eso que ni siquiera la analizo a conciencia). Hay algo tan trágico y visceral en como habla de su amante muerto Genet, algo que se encuentra normalmente en otras novelas bélicas pero que pocas veces se ilustra de una forma tan carnal y única como lo hace él.
No creo que sea un libro sencillo de recomendar porque no pasa gran cosa y verdaderamente, cualquiera cosa que incluya canibalismo y una escena en la que a Hitler le come el culo (en el otro sentido) un twink, pero que al mismo tiempo pinta algunas de las imágenes de post-guerra más descarnadas pero hermosas que he leído nunca suele tener eso en su contra.
No creo que sea un libro sencillo de recomendar porque no pasa gran cosa y verdaderamente, cualquiera cosa que incluya canibalismo y una escena en la que a Hitler le come el culo (en el otro sentido) un twink, pero que al mismo tiempo pinta algunas de las imágenes de post-guerra más descarnadas pero hermosas que he leído nunca suele tener eso en su contra.
May 27, 2012
It's difficult to describe the experiece of reading this text. It's so imaginatively rich, so personally intense and oddly, considering the subject matter, sincere. It seems to me that he takes high Baroque Catholic sentiment and uses it to describe things that no-one is supposed to describe because the experiences are deemed to be outside of "normal" moral behaviour. Yet he manages to transcend the disgust attached to these experiences and produces a prose of luminous beauty. The translation at times is a bit too much like 1930's American gangster films when it tries to convey Genet's use of slang, but no matter - the book is so unique, so exquisite, that it really has a soul of it's own.
June 25, 2017
نادراً ما تهديني الصدفة روايات كهذه. قلت سأقرأ شيء لجان جينيه ، أي شيء ، وجاءت هذه الرواية بصدفة محضة.
مثلها قد لا يكون مردودها الفكري كبيراً ولكن مجرد قرائتها تريك سطورها التي تدخلها مصاف الروايات العالمية.
ينبغي الإشارة الى كونها رواية صعبة ، لا احب هذا النوع من السرد الذي يتبعه الكاتب في ما يعرف ب" سرد الماضي" ، دونما إشارة!
يتكلم ، سطر ونقطة. ويليه سطر مباشرة بعده يتكلم عن موضوع اخر في زمن اخر ، ولا يوضح الشخصيات ولا يشرحها ويعرفنا بها كفاية.
ولكنها رواية مختلفة جداً ، بالوان "قوس قزحية" كثيرة!!
مثلها قد لا يكون مردودها الفكري كبيراً ولكن مجرد قرائتها تريك سطورها التي تدخلها مصاف الروايات العالمية.
ينبغي الإشارة الى كونها رواية صعبة ، لا احب هذا النوع من السرد الذي يتبعه الكاتب في ما يعرف ب" سرد الماضي" ، دونما إشارة!
يتكلم ، سطر ونقطة. ويليه سطر مباشرة بعده يتكلم عن موضوع اخر في زمن اخر ، ولا يوضح الشخصيات ولا يشرحها ويعرفنا بها كفاية.
ولكنها رواية مختلفة جداً ، بالوان "قوس قزحية" كثيرة!!
September 19, 2007
Read this book while in college it was a part of two different classes.One was prison lit the other was gay lit. Seeing that i went to a Catholic college and both classes were taught by nuns I was shocked.An interesting book but very dark indeed.
November 6, 2009
Just re-reread it. Destroys me every single time.
February 4, 2017
مفهمتش حاجة
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