Novels and Places
Marseilles was ideally suited to Genet’s imagination. Like Brest, where he would set Querelle, it would be bombed severely during the Second World War. Once a place was destroyed, it became a suitable subject. Genet wrote about Mettray after it was closed, Brest and Marseilles after they were bombed, Montmartre after it no longer existed as a bohemian or criminal centre but had become a weekend tourist trap. Used materials ‘composed’ best; that is why novelists like to work with them. Only when subjects have lost their journalistic flashiness do they become suitably cool for serious fiction.
– Edmund White, Genet: a biography
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