Our Lady of the Flowers - Classic French Novel by Jean Genet | Perfect for Literature Lovers & Book Club Discussions

One can say with confidence that being confined to a prison cell does not necessarily inhibit one’s literary creativity and expression, as the narrator of this work amply demonstrates. One can also say with confidence that individuals who reside outside the physical boundaries of confinement sometimes erect their own barriers by taking on the thoughts and attitudes of those around them. Locked up in the prison cell of repetition and unquestioned, unexamined loyalty to authority or convention, they frequently join the chorus that sings loudly about the depravity and lowliness of those who do not share their cell.Pure anarchy of thought does not serve as an answer to those who inhabit these self-constructed prisons of thought. It is to be answered by the extreme verbosity of rich language, of sentences that are constructed not to impress, but to illustrate and expose the emptiness of those who cloak themselves with conceptual uniforms made from old cloth and decorated with medals that symbolize their insecurity, both moral and personal. The narrator’s language in this book corrodes both the surfaces and the interiors of the belief structures that are typically asserted to be musical.Between the covers of this book, physical gestures are poems, clocks don’t have the necessity of regularity, but reactions to vulgarities, real or imagined, are the usual overabundant displays of incredulity that are typical of socially formal contexts such as courts of law, adorned as they are with magistrates and mouthpieces who qualify as nothing more than actors. These actors however are skilled, having being educated and refined via tutors who are expert in the meticulous detail of social language and social graces, and are without reservation to be likened to those teachers in the gypsy schools of pickpocketing, who have specialists in the art and physics of wallet removal.But there is always momentary salvation in depravity, if one insists on such a label. Depravity is a local minimum, as the characters in this novel demonstrate without perhaps intending to. They are easily knocked out from this state, either by execution or by their inability to accept that this state is abnormal or to be kept at abeyance. They are quite genuine in who they are though, and what they express, and this makes this book a delight to read, and read, and read again.