As I so often write here, it's been a long time since I read this. Nonetheless, it's a no-brainer that Genet is, for me, a very important writer. There was a time when I lived in an apartment w/ only 8 key bks. "Funeral Rites", or something else by Genet, was one of them. The clear thinking & blatant perversion as a political act are right up my conceptual alley even if Genet & I are very different personalities otherwise. I'm happy to say that I still haven't read "Querelle" yet so there's at least one Genet bk left for me to savor. ( )

Genet has a unique way of mixing very dark images together, blending the brutal with the ethereal. Only Genet can talk about eating the flesh of his dead lover in one sentence and then about having sex with the Nazi murderer in the next. Genet admits, "...the characters in my books all resemble each other," and this is an understatement in this book particularly. However, the translation is a major problem and what the publishers deemed sanitized enough for audiences of 60 years ago is pretty tame by today's standards. If the so called “dirty parts” were left out, one is left wondering what else [perhaps substantive] may have also been left out. I cannot say this is an easy read or one that I would recommend to most, but it is essential. ( )

In Funeral Rites, Genet again employs feverish chimeric visions as a canvas for metaphor, this time using war and questions of patriotism as a mode of exploration for his love of Jean Decarnin, a man shot dead by a German collaborator during the Liberation of Paris. Genet writes of the murderous collaborator, Riton, "[...] he realized that he loved his country. Just as it was on the day Jean died that I knew I loved him, so it was on losing France that he knew he loved her." This confused internal tension in Riton's character between love and hate permeates the novel, as he continuously yearns, but alternately fears or perhaps even detests, the virile German soldier Erik.

With his familiar and robust illustrations of eroticism and death, Genet traverses a city besieged by war as he has slums and prisons. Genet explores the characters of this work in order to explore his own loss, and does so with his usual poetic voice and visceral prose style. Unlike some of his other novels, this work seems to lack but a few degrees of intimacy. It almost feels that in the characters of Riton and Erik, amongst others, Genet crafts the smallest distance that prevents the reader from penetrating Genet's emotion as deeply. If this is so, perhaps this is for good reason. We may not be permitted to touch the very center of this loss? ( )

"Si le chien me lance une pierre, je la rapporte dans ma gueule."