The Thief's Journal

Blurb

The Thief's Journal is perhaps Jean Genet's most famous work. It is a part-fact, part-fiction autobiography that charts the author's progress through Europe in a curiously depoliticized 1930s, wearing nothing but rags and enduring hunger, contempt, fatigue and vice. Spain, Italy, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Nazi Germany, Belgium... everywhere is the same: bars, dives, flop-houses; robbery, prison and expulsion.
The novel is structured around a series of homosexual love affairs and male prostitution between the author/anti-hero and various criminals, con artists, pimps, and even a detective.
A common theme is the inversion of ideals: betrayal is the ultimate form of devotion, petty delinquency is brazen heroism, and confinement is freedom.
Under the inspiration of "Being and Nothingness", this work is affirmed to be the "pursuit of the impossible nothingness" and it was dedicated to Jean-Paul Sartre and "Castor", i.e. Simone de Beauvoir. Sartre wrote his essay "Saint Genet", influenced by this work, in 1952.
Genet appropriates Christian language and concepts to pursue an alternative form of "sainthood" with its own trinity of "virtues" - homosexuality, theft, and betrayal.