The Maids / Alison Croggon

I vividly remember my first encounter with the writing of Jean Genet. I was around nineteen and for reasons I forget - perhaps no reason - I picked up his first novel, Our Lady of the Flowers. I read it in a kind of daze: I found myself hypnotised by the sheer decadent sensuality of the prose, and at the same time completely confused. I did not understand this moral universe at all.

Yet, when I reached its final pages, there occurred one of those perceptual shifts that art can occasionally produce, a kind of click; the mental equivalent, I suppose, of those Victorian optical puzzles where you suddenly realise that what appears at first to be a white vase is also two faces in profile. It was as if, through the experience of reading it... (click to read full article)

from: [http://theatrenotes.blogspot.com/2005/05/maids.html]