Splendid's - Softcover

Genet, Jean; Bartlett, Neil

3.36

33 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0571176135 ISBN 13: 9780571176137

Publisher: Faber & Faber, 1995

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Exhausted, unshaven and wearing evening dress, Jean Genet's gangsters never let go of their machine-guns - not even when they dance together. Their conversations contain some of Genet's finest dialogue; an insane mixture of melodramatic speech-making and low-camp bickering, all wrapped up in a sexy pastiche of forties American film noir, lurching stylishly from tough realism into wicked black humour. Splendid's, a two-act police thriller written in 1948, was never staged in Genet's lifetime. In 1952 he announced that he had destroyed the manuscript and the play was assumed lost. Only in 1993 did a surviving copy reappear. Translated by writer, performer and director Neil Bartlett, this volume also contains a full introduction by Genet's biographer, Edmund White.

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About the Author:

Jean Genet was born in Paris in 1910. An illegitimate child who never knew his parents, he was abandoned to the Public Assistance Authorities. He was ten when he was sent to a reformatory for stealing; thereafter he spent time in the prisons of nearly every country he visited in thirty years of prowling through the European underworld. With ten convictions for theft in France to his credit he was, the eleventh time, condemned to life imprisonment. Eventually he was granted a pardon by President Auriol as a result of appeals from France's leading artists and writers led by Jean Cocteau.

His first novel, Our Lady of the Flowers, was written while he was in prison, followed by Miracle of the Rose, the autobiographical The Thief's Journal, Querelle of Brest and Funeral Rites. He wrote six plays: The Balcony, The Blacks, The Screens, The Maids, Deathwatch and Splendid's (the manuscript of which was rediscovered only in 1993). Jean Genet died in 1986.

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