Funeral Rites

“Yeats once remarked that the only two subjects worth of a serious mind are sex and death. Had he been born a generation later, he would have lived long enough to find the perfect embodiment of his thesis in Genet.” —Atlanta Journal “Only a handful of twentieth-century writers, such as Kafka and Proust, have as important, as authoritative, as irrevocable a voice and style.” —Susan Sontag Genet’s sensual and brutal portrait of World War II France unfolds between the poles of his grief for his lover Jean, killed in the Resistance during the liberation of Paris, and his perverse attraction to the collaborator Riton. Elegiac, macabre, chimerical, it is a dark meditation on the mirror images of love and hate, sex and death.