Books like Funeral Rites

A lover's death is more than a merely emotional loss: it leaves us filled with physical desires now made insatiable by the lack of their object. All the erotic attraction, sexual pulsions, secret needs that drew us toward THAT person are still there, permeating our psyche as well as our body. Death suddenly deprives them of the possibility to find their natural way out. And their way out leads to a body.We might love the soul, but what we truly desire is the body. Because we are earthly creatures whose life is, as far as we can tell, basically a system of physical reactions permanently triggering a system of perceptions. In the evolution of mankind the psychological is a consequence, not a cause: thought was a luxury we could afford only after we took control of the physical by knowing our anatomy and all its potential. Eroticism is indeed the response to a primal impulse - sex aiming to reproduction - after it is internalised. Such impulse, the catalyst, is not within us though: it's an exogenous factor we'll never fully control, it's another being whose presence we can only feel, not assimilate. Physical contact is the only possible substitute for the assimilation of the one we love. It's the cannibalism of the soul. Death is most of all the deprivation of the object.Despite any conceivable belief in afterlife, metempsychosis, transmigration, re-embodiment - despite any possible degree of faith or madness, we miss the sight of our beloved more than we miss his moral convictions; we miss the sound of his voice more than we miss his political convictions; the empty place in our bed calls for the warmth of his body, not for his tastes in literature. Loss unveils the nature of our longing, so deeply rooted in our flesh and bones that, by losing the other, we feel our own body rotting in a surplus of desire gone to waste. Loss is indeed the grave of the living. At this point, any attempt for connection between us and the dead becomes a Funeral Rite. Rites are the enactment of our deepest , darkest mental drives. Since our mental drives are basically sex (survival) and death (self-destruction), the logical consequence is that rites are the means for mankind to stage sex and death in order to exorcise them, first by giving them shape and then by harnessing their power in a structure of language and imagery: an incantation... a spell. Jean Genet's tribute to his dead lover is a spell against the death of love.When desperation is so overwhelming that hope has nothing to lose anymore, that's when we start living again; we're born again. We're beyond desperation, resignation, rationalisation... we've gone through our personal initiation to the Mystery.Paris, August 1944: Genet's twenty-year-old lover dies during the anti-German riots, killed by the French collaborationist militia. After the burial, the grieving author is increasingly drawn toward the people who had most affected the last days of the young partisan's life: the boy's girlfriend, who was bearing another man's child; his step-brother (a hustler, petty thief and occasional collaborator of the Nazis); his mother, whose tragic, heroic sordidness is the embodiment of a whole nation's state of mind; the German she keeps hidden in her apartment; and his imaginary murder. Yes, imaginary: the man is indeed unknown, one of the numberless anonymous executioners of history. All the author can do is conjure up his features from scratch.From this moment on, Genet gets increasingly obsessed with the faceless, nameless militian who shed his lover's blood. He imagines him to be a sixteen-year-old kid, one of those kids he loves and craves for, cruel and innocent at the same time, a symbol of beauty and youth as well as of amorality and betrayal. The murderer is therefore the ultimate embodiment of the author's conflicting desires and pulsions: since he took his victim's life, that martyred life and the killer's have merged. By possessing the murderous kid Genet snatches his beloved's soul from the claws of death and gives him a brand new physical existence. Thus the connection is made; the living and the dead have crossed the boundaries of existence and met again. As always in Genet, any single character in this anti-novel can morph into anybody else at the author's will; his own viewpoint changes throughout the book in a bewildering, dazzling mirror maze of voices and perspectives. There's no physical nor psychological dimension that can't be penetrated (quite literally), permeated, violated by a narrator who does more than presiding over his 'creatures': in fact he enters their minds, bodies and souls to the point of utterly forgetting himself, sucking the reader in, disappearing and reappearing over and over again, when and where one least expects. The void left by the dead youth is an all-devouring emotional black hole threatening Genet's daily existence with loss, sorrow, frustrated lust, longing; all that is left of his lover is the people he got in touch with and the traces of his passage in their lives. Such a revelation leads the narrator to summon them all in order to perform his secret, esoteric funeral rites - thus setting himself free of the ghost that is haunting him. These individuals become therefore actors on a stage, existences merging into each other, shapeshifting and elusive like the memory of a dream. As in "Notre-Dame-des-Fleurs", they relentlessly love and kill and hate and desire each other, being at the same time narrators and avatars in a world of unlimited fantasies. In Genet's wild dreams the German soldier hidden in the apartment has a desperate liaison with the young militian. During the last days of the Nazi occupation, when hunger, fear, horror are ravaging both the city and the soul of its inhabitants, their intercourse is the symbol of any nation that willingly gives itself to its rapers (Pétain's France, Quisling's Norway, the Ukrainian collaborators, the Italian Socialist Republic of Salò... there's no difference really. All nations have their peculiar pulsions of death.) Because in the all-pervading gloom of 1944 death and lust are omnipresent. And a maid is so physically and morally exhausted that she lets a couple of guards rape her in a cemetery after the burial of her newborn child. A redundant warning: if you're easily offended by the depiction of sex and deviant behaviour, don't ever read this book.There's a lot of sex here, mostly homosexual, mostly violent, seldom tender and often dirty. These pages are soaked in lust, either physical or mental. Because lust is life crying out and calling for us. It's life asserting itself in the middle of horror; it's the voice of life after the very last hope has been silenced by bullets or grieving. If you're brave or mad enough to read this modern Book of the Dead, beware: don't ever believe Jean Genet's words. He will lie to you, again and again. He will take you where you don't want to go and you'll get lost in an unknown, dangerous land, where all is true but nothing is real. This is neither a novel nor a memoir. No linear narrative, no reliable confession will help you find your way out. You enter at your own risk. It's not stream of consciousness either; it's more consciousness of the stream. The stream of life and death and the way they constantly get entangled.