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Our Lady of the Flowers (Notre-Dame-des-Fleurs) is the debut novel of French writer Jean Genet, first published in 1943. The free-flowing, poetic novel is a largely autobiographical account of a man's journey through the Parisian underworld. The characters are drawn after their real-life counterparts, who are mostly homosexuals living on the fringes of society.
The novel tells the story of Divine, a drag queen who, when the novel opens, has died of tuberculosis and been canonised as a result. The narrator tells us that the stories he is telling are mainly to amuse himself whilst he passes his sentence in prison – and the highly erotic, often explicitly sexual, stories are spun to assist his masturbation. Jean-Paul Sartre called it "the epic of masturbation".
Divine lives in an attic room overlooking Montmartre cemetery, which she shares with various lovers, the most important of whom is a pimp called Darling Daintyfoot. One day Darling brings home a young hoodlum and murderer, dubbed Our Lady of the Flowers. Our Lady is eventually arrested and tried, and executed. Death and ecstasy accompany the acts of every character, as Genet performs a transvaluation of all values, making betrayal the highest moral value, murder an act of virtue and sexual appeal.
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Our Lady of Flowers
March 1976, Grove Press, Grove/Atlantic, Incorporated
in English
039417903X 9780394179032
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Notre Dame Des Fleurs
Publish date unknown, Folio
Mass Market Paperback
in French
2070368602 9782070368600
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"Our Lady of the Flowers, which is often considered to be Genet's masterpiece, was written entirely in the solitude of a prison cell."
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- Created April 29, 2008
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October 25, 2021 | Edited by Jenner | Merge works |
May 31, 2019 | Edited by MARC Bot | associate 1 edition with work |
April 26, 2011 | Edited by OCLC Bot | Added OCLC numbers. |
August 6, 2010 | Edited by IdentifierBot | added LibraryThing ID |
April 29, 2008 | Created by an anonymous user | Imported from amazon.com record |