The Thief's Journal

First Edition, first printing, in English, translated from the French by Bernard Frechtman, with a forward by Jean-Paul Satre. Originally published by Gallimard in Paris in 1949 as "Journal du Voleur". Original red cloth with the excellent and unclipped dust-jacket, a couple of trivial blemishes, near fine. No old inscriptions or other internal markings. A lovely copy of this seminal work of "outsider" literature, first published in 1949. "The novel is structured around a series of homosexual love affairs between the author/anti-hero and various criminals, con artists, pimps, and a detective. Genet is in love with "theft and thieves, fairies and whores" and describes the ins and outs of his homosexual lifestyle with little filter. Penniless, he makes his way across 1932 Europe, riddled with a whole system of beggars, vermin ridden, cold and hungry, searching out a bit of bread, a limp cabbage, the barest bones of shelter. Flanders. Poland. Nazi Germany. Czechoslovakia. Andalusia, the Spanish coast, tramping parallel with pilgrims on the Way of St. James. Young Jean, the conscious louse, vagabond-thief, serving pimps and dope peddlers. To steal is to eat, almost a job, but to commit offences worthy of prison is another kind of necessity. He performs all solicited ritual initiations and in turn recomposes the atmosphere, elevates these men, crowning them with the laurels of his own design. Salvador, Lucien, Guy, and Stilitano, blond as a ship, Billy Budd blond. This is a man's world, where femininity is contained within a hard gait. He loves them, at his most miserable, whether for their strength, grace, ugliness, or a fabulously endowed member. And why do they love him? Perhaps they already understand that they will one day be remembered through him, each a violet, a forget-me-not pressed within the pages of his yet unwritten book of life" - Patti Smith, from Paris Review.