Reviews for Alexander's Bridge

The average rating for Alexander's Bridge based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2007-11-04 00:00:00 Brian Sanders Without a doubt one in a proper life needs to be obsessed with the early Kinks, a love of Howlin' Wolf, read the entire works of Oscar Wilde, to know that there is a big difference between Brian Jones era Rolling Stones to the current Ron Wood years, the love of Charles Shaw brand of wine, and this novel by Jean Genet. It's a must for every young man and woman to read as a teenager. For old men like me it brings a tear to my eye. And why is it that? There is something so incredibly romantic about Genet - and it goes beyond the gay or straight world - it's just a great twilight world where these people live. If you haven't read 'The Thief's Journal, do so. It's a great adventure of sorts.

Review # 2 was written on 2019-02-24 00:00:00 John Lussier Reminiscent of the work of Louis-Ferdinand Céline and Henry Miller, Genet's autobiographical novel which was first published at the mid-point of his career in 1948, stands somewhere between his earlier works of fiction and his later works of drama. It is a long (too long for me) meditation on betrayal, thievery and homosexuality, of which Genet doesn't hold back on, explicitly speaking. For the most part, The Thief's Journal is a fragmented account of Genet's time spent during the Thirties and early Forties as he travelled around Europe. We catch glimpses of Genet wandering through Barcelona, Antwerp, Gibraltar, Czechoslovakia, Poland, and their respective lock-ups. It's characters, apart from the main man himself are an allsorts bunch of those who specialize in beggary, buggery, and a mixture of crimes. The activities in which this Motley crew engage in includes thefts, prostitution, drug running, pimping, and dealing counterfeit money. There is love, there is disloyalty and back-stabbing, and there is prison. And after a while things get repetitive, albeit in a different location. However, Genet's writing is difficult to turn away from at times. He simply leaves nothing on the table, and writes from the head, the heart, the guts, and the ejaculatory duct. Sometimes I felt like wanting to go take a hot shower, but that just shows the powerful effect that literature can have on the reader. This is a work written largely as a work of self-examination, self-justification, and self-creation. Infused with the narrative episodes of the book are long passages of meditation; sometimes these passages take the form of lyrical effusion, sometimes of erotic reverie; sometimes they are disquisitions on the moral and metaphysical themes running throughout the book. Although It was penned in a beautiful and poetic prose, and offers a philosophical viewpoint that not many would dare to commit to, the narrative does get broken up too often, and feels scattered as Genet shifts topics, before cutting back in where he left off before. Flashes of brilliance here and there, but also much frustration when summing-up. Others I know claim he was a much better dramatist than he was a novelist, but I will need to read more of him before drawing up my own conclusions.