Notre-Dame-des-Fleurs

Jean Genet     1943     272p     5 x 8

The novel tells the story of Divine, a drag queen who, when the novel opens, has died of tuberculosis and been canonised as a result. The narrator tells us that the stories he is telling are mainly to amuse himself whilst he passes his sentence in prison – and the highly erotic, often explicitly sexual, stories are spun to assist his masturbation. The free-flowing, poetic novel is a largely autobiographical account of a man’s journey through the Parisian underworld. The characters are drawn after their real-life counterparts, who are mostly queers living on the fringes of society.

$3-10