Paris Review Daily Publishes Excerpt of New Introduction, by Patti Smith, to Jean Genet's The Thief's Journal

Patti Smith's introduction to the new edition of Jean Genet's The Thief’s Journal (Grove Atlantic, this month, originally published 1949), "his most exquisite piece of autobiographical fiction," is up at the Paris Review Daily, and worth a look: 

...He is the transparent observer reclaiming the suffering and exhilaration of his own follies, trials, and evolution. There are no masks; there are veils. He does not retreat; he extracts the noble of the ignoble. The sullied thug advances into the night as a coquette in tattered tulle sewn with scattered spangles, bits of tin caught in the lamplight transposing as glittering stars. The conversion of these rags, emblematic of the interior brightening he chronicles, generates not through facts but a luxurious truth. For within his poetic form of memoir, facts are not necessary, as they shift through a shifting perspective. He loses himself, self reflects on his own process as a writer, then is off again, into a subterranean world of men, with the violence of electronic corpuscles circling a sun of energy. He reenters the labyrinth of this formative time, simultaneously wrenched to learn the last prisoners are being transported back from Devil’s Island as the French Republic, citing inhuman conditions, closes the penal colony forever. “I am shorn of my infamy,” he mourns. He will be condemned to serve his sentence outside of Paris in brown homespun. The Thief’s Journal, though published in France in 1949, was not available in America until Grove Press boldly published it in 1964. It was skillfully translated by the great Bernard Frechtman, who understood perfectly Genet’s sense of language moving seamlessly from street argot to the sublime. I bought my copy at the Eighth Street Bookshop in the West Village. It was stacked on the remainder table with other Grove masterpieces, Evergreen Reviews, and suppressed titles from the Olympia Press—forbidden books yearned for. Ninety-nine cents, in the winter of 1968. I hurried back to Brooklyn by subway to the apartment I shared with Robert Mapplethorpe. That night, I read it to Robert as the snow fell.

For myself, every page was a miracle, and for Robert, a portal into a world he was clandestinely drawn and would eventually immortalize through the image...

The full excerpt of "Holy Disobedience: An Introduction to the New Edition" is here.