A thief is someone who steals, but what do you call someone who steals and gets caught all the time? Who gets caught lifting handkerchiefs from a Paris department store, for instance, and then a few days later, his sentence having been remitted, gets caught again, this time in the act of pinching stuff from parked cars? An incompetent thief, perhaps - which was what Cocteau called Genet, the delinquent in question: 'You are a bad thief, you get caught. But you are a good writer.' Genet said much the same thing about himself in a late interview. But then what happens when this incompetent thief writes, as Genet does in Our Lady of the Flowers, in the manner of a handbook on how to get away with it?

LRB 10 June 1993 | PDF Download