The Thief’s Journal     by Jean Genet, Translated by B Frechtman Original title: Journal du voleur Original language: French Published by Grove/Atlantic, Inc. Pub. Date: 1973 Format: Paperback Dimensions: (in inches): 0.80 x 8.24 x 5.38 ISBN: 0802130143 List Price: $12.00 Buy online from Amazon.com for $10.40 Published by Penguin Pub. Date: 1971 Pub. Place: UK Format: 224 pages List Price: £6.99 Not available for ordering

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Jean Genet was a sort of Johnny Rotten of French literature, a fervent genius who even after his release from prison and acceptance by the Establishment was so addicted to theft that he stole diamonds from the society hostesses who fawned over him at their literary receptions.


The Thief’s Journal takes us through the trans-European underworld in which he spent his young draft-dodging years: opium-rackets, prostitution, seedy bars, begging, stealing, gaol and more gaol (‘gaols,’ he writes, ‘were built for me’). What makes the book remarkable is the sacred awe with which Genet regards this ‘forbidden universe.’ He practices theft as a priest might practice a religious rite, inhales the smell of sweat, sperm and blood as though it were holy incense and finds a perverse sublimity in poverty — claiming that ‘the most sordid signs became for me signs of grandeur.’


Here, as in his first novel Our Lady of the Flowers, Genet’s prose is intensely pictorial. As he crossed each border, he writes, ‘I would penetrate less into a country than to the interior of an image.’ So Poland reveals itself to him through its rye fields and the blond hair of its young men, Spain through its ‘landscapes of sharp rocks that gnawed the sky and ripped the azure.’ People, too, are transformed into images, with thieves occupying the zenith of the whole pictorial hierarchy, exquisite icons. ‘Should I have to portray a convict — or a criminal,’ writes Genet in the preface to The Thief’s Journal, ‘I shall so bedeck him with flowers that, as he disappears beneath them, he will himself become a flower, a gigantic and new one.’

‘If I wanted my policemen and hoodlums to be handsome, it was in order that their dazzling bodies might avenge the contempt in which you hold them. Hard muscles and harmonious faces were meant to hymn and glorify the odious functions of my friends and impose them upon you. Whenever I met a good-looking kid, I would tremble at the thought that he might be high-minded, though I tolerated the idea that a petty, despicable mind might inhabit a puny body. Since rectitude was your domain, I would have none of it, though I often recognised its nostalgic appeal. I had to fight against its charms. Criminals and the police are the most virile emanation of this world.’ p161