Dominique Eddé met novelist and playwright Jean Genet in the 1970s. And she never forgot him. ' His presence' , she writes, ' gave me the sensation of icy fire. Like his words, his gestures were full, calculated and precise [...] Genet's movements mimicked the movement of time, accumulating rather than passing.'

This book is Edde' s account of that meeting and its ripples through her years of engaging with Genet' s life and work. Rooted in personal reminiscences, it is nonetheless much broader, offering a subtle analysis of Genet' s work and teasing out largely unconsidered themes, like the absence of the father, which becomes a metaphor for Genet' s perpetual attack on the law. Tying Genet to Dostoevsky through their shared fascination with crime, Edde helps us more clearly understand Genet' s relationship to France and Palestine, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, the theater, and even death. A powerful personal account of the influence of one writer on another, The Crime of Jean Genet is also one of the most penetrating explorations yet of Genet' s work and achievement.

' Edde' s book is an intelligent but not reverential account of the way in which Jean Genet fascinated and intimidated her.' - Times Literary Supplement

' For an American reader (or writer) currently agonizing over the degradation of civic values, The Crime of Jean Genet insists on a bracing distinction between literary art that assumes its anger exerts a force for change versus writing that never seeks to resolve or explain but, rather, to dissolve and destroy.' - On the Seawall