Saint Genet: Actor and Martyr

Rating:
Summary: beauty takes place..
Review: 'Grandly conceived and executed' .... 'Magnificent'.... 'Nothing less than masterly' ... critical tributes offered Sartre's Saint Genet that end as mere words. Saint Genet is an unearthly book wrought with the passion of a gospel narrative, explicit and wrenching. It is, finally, an entire act of redemption. The language is apocryphal and never operatic, epic in delivery, even greater than it seems; page upon page of an exceeding pure, and never vulgarly rich, damask brocade! I'll not critique Sartre's thought --it's privilege enough to be presented it!-- but this seminal work is a miraculous construct of human will and unbearable genius that will live forever, a complex and magisterial book ranking among the great achievments of modern literature because of its erudition, humanity, and fierce literary reach. There is not a page that doesn't honor wisdom, nor is there a single idle component. It is indisputably Sartre's crowning achievment as a genius, and as a man. The evocative humanity of two literary giants of the 20th century plays like a dance, the captured aesthetic of which Sartre reveals; everything is taken to the temple of Genet, everything explained, everything mortified, slain and remade. Reading this book is a revealing experience; be willing to be stolen. Theft happens in broad daylight, perpetrators already known.. My favorite chapter is 'Cain,' in which Sartre makes his most profound arguments about Genet as Other, Genet as the living inverse Liturgy, and presents a stupefying image of his subject: 'Everything is possessed, worked, occupied, from the sky to the subsoil...' Intimidating in its greatness.