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Tombeau pour cinq cent mille soldats
Tombeau pour cinq cent mille soldats est un roman d'une violence extraordinaire, descente aux enfers où tout est lié à l'horreur d'une guerre coloniale, dans un pays imaginaire (mais on pense à l'Algérie). Oppresseurs et opprimés, réduits au sens propre à l'esclavage, sont pervertis par les forces les plus obscures que déchaîne la guerre.
«En ce temps-là, la guerre couvrait Ecbatane. Beaucoup d'esclaves s'échappaient, s'accrochaient aux vainqueurs mais quand ceux-ci voulaient les faire parler sur la résistance des occupés, les esclaves refusaient de livrer le nom de leurs anciens maîtres, ils retombaient alors dans une plus grande servitude. Ecbatane était encore la plus vaste capitale de l'Occident : elle avait été bâtie sur quinze kilomètres de côtes. Chaque jour, les plages en contrebas du boulevard du front de mer se couvraient de cadavres de jeunes résistants débarqués la nuit et fusillés par les sentinelles de mer. Les vainqueurs avaient vaincu sans peine : ils avaient pris une ville qui se débarrassait de ses dieux.»
«En ce temps-là, la guerre couvrait Ecbatane. Beaucoup d'esclaves s'échappaient, s'accrochaient aux vainqueurs mais quand ceux-ci voulaient les faire parler sur la résistance des occupés, les esclaves refusaient de livrer le nom de leurs anciens maîtres, ils retombaient alors dans une plus grande servitude. Ecbatane était encore la plus vaste capitale de l'Occident : elle avait été bâtie sur quinze kilomètres de côtes. Chaque jour, les plages en contrebas du boulevard du front de mer se couvraient de cadavres de jeunes résistants débarqués la nuit et fusillés par les sentinelles de mer. Les vainqueurs avaient vaincu sans peine : ils avaient pris une ville qui se débarrassait de ses dieux.»
504 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1967
34 people are currently reading
1696 people want to read
About the author
Pierre Guyotat
37 books113 followersBorn in Bourg-Argental, Loire, Guyotat wrote his first novel, Sur un cheval, in 1960. He was called to Algeria in the same year. In 1962 he was found guilty of desertion and publishing forbidden material. After three months in jail he was transferred to a disciplinary centre. Back in Paris, he got involved in journalism, writing first for France Observateur, then for Nouvel Observateur. In 1964, Guyotat published his second novel Ashby.
In 1967, he published Tombeau pour cinq cent mille soldats (later released in English as Tomb for 500,000 Soldiers). Based on Guyotat's ordeal as a soldier in the Algerian War, the book earned a cult reputation and became the subject of various controversies, mostly because of its omnipresent sexual obsessions and homoeroticism.
In 1968, Guyotat became a member of the French Communist Party, which he left in 1971.
Eden, Eden, Eden came out in 1970 with a preface by Michel Leiris, Roland Barthes and Philippe Sollers (Michel Foucault's text was received late and therefore didn't appear as a preface). This book was banned from being publicized or sold to under-18s. A petition of international support was signed (notably by Pier Paolo Pasolini, Jean-Paul Sartre, Pierre Boulez, Joseph Beuys, Pierre Dac, Jean Genet, Simone de Beauvoir, Joseph Kessel, Maurice Blanchot, Max Ernst, Italo Calvino, Jacques Monod, and Nathalie Sarraute). François Mitterrand, and Georges Pompidou tried to get the ban lifted but failed. Claude Simon (who won the Nobel Prize in 1985) resigned from the jury of the Prix Médicis after the prize wasn't awarded to Eden, Eden, Eden.
In 1967, he published Tombeau pour cinq cent mille soldats (later released in English as Tomb for 500,000 Soldiers). Based on Guyotat's ordeal as a soldier in the Algerian War, the book earned a cult reputation and became the subject of various controversies, mostly because of its omnipresent sexual obsessions and homoeroticism.
In 1968, Guyotat became a member of the French Communist Party, which he left in 1971.
Eden, Eden, Eden came out in 1970 with a preface by Michel Leiris, Roland Barthes and Philippe Sollers (Michel Foucault's text was received late and therefore didn't appear as a preface). This book was banned from being publicized or sold to under-18s. A petition of international support was signed (notably by Pier Paolo Pasolini, Jean-Paul Sartre, Pierre Boulez, Joseph Beuys, Pierre Dac, Jean Genet, Simone de Beauvoir, Joseph Kessel, Maurice Blanchot, Max Ernst, Italo Calvino, Jacques Monod, and Nathalie Sarraute). François Mitterrand, and Georges Pompidou tried to get the ban lifted but failed. Claude Simon (who won the Nobel Prize in 1985) resigned from the jury of the Prix Médicis after the prize wasn't awarded to Eden, Eden, Eden.
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September 8, 2021
This book is soaked in blood, smeared with shit, stinking of putrefaction and sticky with cum. And it's about innocence.
Innocence is a wild flower blossomed in a mass grave.
Guyotat took part in the Algerian war in 1960, at the age of 20, and started working on "Tomb for 500.000 Soldiers" in 1963; he was only 23 when he wrote the book that encompasses any other book ever written.
During those three years he got blinded by the light of Heaven while sinking down the drain of Hell. I know because he took me there and showed me things and places I had been waiting all my life to see.
Although having triggered his darkest pulsions and shaped the imagery that would haunt him ever since, the author's traumatic experience in Algeria is not the actual core of his work. The setting is neither Algeria nor the Algerian war of 1954-1962, as in Guyotat's vision both subjects are so transcendental they become utterly abstract. The setting is any place and time we can think of; it's our mind, our own inner Algeria getting rid of its masters. Getting out of control.
Sept Chants ('Seven Chants'): thus the book was originally named, due to the structure and nature of the text. Seven chants indeed, seven visions of unthinkable beauty and revolting horror sucking the reader in until he completely loses his capacity - and will - to discern between the two.
A metaphorical plot, metaphysical rather than geographical boundaries, no boundaries to the potential of imagery and language: all throughout this orgy of sex and warfare the author's genius gives shape to stifling landscapes of destruction and decay in which an unfathomable Mesopotamia meets the violence of the Sixties.
Cities crawling with slaves, whores, slum dwellers eaten by lice and worms, child traffickers, demented governors, decadent Cardinals, sex-crazed generals, blood-thirsty sapphic princesses, old hags gorging themselves with rats and corpses; villages, islands, military camps, the countryside burnt with napalm, roamed by the jeeps and tanks of the occupation army of Ecbatana (hard not to see France, the Métropole, in Guyotat's symbology), hordes of beastly partisans, trains carrying their load of prisoners to impromptu gas chambers; streets, imperial palaces, brothels, barracks in which any conceivable violence tenderness intercourse madness and holiness take place; herons, squirrels, butterflies, mountain streams, wild flowers, sandy winds, fiery sunsets and dawns; and the haunting, obsessive omnipresence of excrement, semen, blood, vomit, sweat, saliva - soaking the gutwrenching decay as well as the overwhelmingly beautiful landscapes, a lymph flowing through the veins of the world and all its creatures.
How is it possible to write more than 600 pages of obscenities without falling into pornography? How can anybody deal with the most astonishing acts of depravity, cruelty and insanity without ever using one single dirty word and displaying instead all the beauty of his mother tongue?
By being a poet.
This book is drenched in poetry; every single page of it ejaculates poetry in the reader's mental orifices. This is not reading, it's having unprotected sex with the deepest, darkest and truest part of yourself. Nobody writes like Guyotat does. This is the language of hallucinations and prophecies, with an unparalleled skill in describing human bodies and natural settings, noises and tastes and tactile feelings in beautifully crafted long-winded paragraphs made of short sentences in which reading becomes a sensory experience all of its own. The book's length is yet another means to create a hypnotic state in the reader, an ecstatic desensitisation of the mind - exhaustion leading to total vulnerability.
Guyotat's aim is to portray nature as it is: the harmony of amorality. In his universe there's absolutely no difference between humans, animals, vegetation, rocks and water; they're all part of one and the same cycle of creation and destruction, none of them ever really prevailing over the others. In the outskirts of a bombed village a man kills the cub of a wild beast that devours him before getting smashed to a pulp by a rock which subsequently crumbles under the tanks of an army doomed to be exterminated by the plague... on and on, life being constantly on the edge of a mass grave between Eden and Utopia, where any difference of race, status and morals becomes irrelevant (the title refers to the amount of casualties during the Algerian war of independence: civilians and soldiers, French and natives, OAS and rebels, tortured and torturers).
Honestly, I find it hard to understand the attitude of those readers who censure the horror without even sensing the poetry of these pages. Let's go to Isenheim and turn Grünewald's gangrenous, suppurating Christ into firewood in the name of decency; let's chop off David's dick. Pope Paul IV would be proud of us.
If beauty is in the eye of the beholder, so is ugliness.
As a matter of fact, innocence and guilt need each other in order to exist, and the hand drawing the line between the two is that of intent. Without intent there can be neither guilt nor sin.
Sin is the deliberate violation of what we have come to know and accept as a limit transcending the material dimension of civilisation. Sin and crime are therefore on two entirely different planes, and mixing the two would be a dangerous mistake. In the western world killing is always condemned as a sin, whereas it is not always punished as a crime. War, justice, medicine are allowed to murder us simply by allowing us to murder each other (the enemy we bomb, the prisoner we execute, the incurable sick we euthanise).
Such is the painful contradiction that has been at the core of our sense of guilt for at least 100.000 years, ever since we realised how devastatingly evil our potential is; how easily our civilisation(s) can blur the border between good and evil, to the point that the real judge of this world is basically our whimsical self, with all its misery and greatness.
Sin was created to prevent us from being the insane judges of our own madness.
We aren't sinning as long as we don't know - or refuse to acknowledge - the limit defining what sin is.
In Guyotat's world, neither psyche nor will do exist. It's the world before (or after) human beings became human; a dimension of humanness in which the psyche doesn't exist yet (or anymore), a state of grace beyond space and time where the human body and psychology are still (or finally) strangers to each other. Whenever history allows us to turn our soul into a blank slate, the elating trauma of freedom makes us cross that threshold and colonise the inland of our soul.
Do not look for an anti-war elegy here, do not hope in a political manifesto. References to the anachronistic imperialism of De Gaulle's France, the OAS, the depravity of freedom fighters keen on the same excesses perpetrated by the invaders are to be found here (along with flashbacks of Nazi-occupied Paris/Ecbatana), but they're definitely not the subject of Guyotat's visionary lyricism. What truly matters here is neither morality nor immorality: it's amorality, ergo the lack of both.
War is indeed only one of many possible scenarios for the author to stage the exhibition of all the horrors mankind has ever known, created, suffered and inflicted: war, pillage, rape, slavery , prostitution, murder, pedophilia, cannibalism, tyranny, madness... the world he depicts, the creatures he portrays are utterly devoid of any sense of guilt and shame. Beyond good and evil? No: beyond the very difference between the two. These are not human beings - they're only beings, indistinguishable from the wild beasts and barnyard animals around them, living in what can be both pre- and post-humanity.
Their passions and feelings are pure, untamed, unfettered.
They're innocent, and so are we.
This is the most devastating revelation ever. We can easily cope with guilt and punishment, but we'll always be terrified of innocence, especially our own.
"Ils ont fait l'horreur, qu'ils la voient maintenant, dégrisés et celle-ci ne leur appartenant plus."
Don't read this.
It's dangerous.
Poisonous.
It does something to you.
Oh, the things I did while reading this book... the way it affected me, dragging me down to those dark recesses I had always been either afraid or unaware of before I fell under the spell of Guyotat's insanity.
An insanity that happens to be mine too, as I inexorably morphed into one of his characters and got deliriously lost in that feeling - sinking deeper and deeper into my own private Algeria.
"Tomb for 500.000 Soldiers" touched me in a way no other book ever did. Thank God I didn't read this as a teenager. I'd be in jail now, getting raped on a daily basis by a whole block of tattooed inmates or fingering the guards in exchange for protection and books.
Innocence is a wild flower blossomed in a mass grave.
Guyotat took part in the Algerian war in 1960, at the age of 20, and started working on "Tomb for 500.000 Soldiers" in 1963; he was only 23 when he wrote the book that encompasses any other book ever written.
During those three years he got blinded by the light of Heaven while sinking down the drain of Hell. I know because he took me there and showed me things and places I had been waiting all my life to see.
Although having triggered his darkest pulsions and shaped the imagery that would haunt him ever since, the author's traumatic experience in Algeria is not the actual core of his work. The setting is neither Algeria nor the Algerian war of 1954-1962, as in Guyotat's vision both subjects are so transcendental they become utterly abstract. The setting is any place and time we can think of; it's our mind, our own inner Algeria getting rid of its masters. Getting out of control.
Sept Chants ('Seven Chants'): thus the book was originally named, due to the structure and nature of the text. Seven chants indeed, seven visions of unthinkable beauty and revolting horror sucking the reader in until he completely loses his capacity - and will - to discern between the two.
A metaphorical plot, metaphysical rather than geographical boundaries, no boundaries to the potential of imagery and language: all throughout this orgy of sex and warfare the author's genius gives shape to stifling landscapes of destruction and decay in which an unfathomable Mesopotamia meets the violence of the Sixties.
Cities crawling with slaves, whores, slum dwellers eaten by lice and worms, child traffickers, demented governors, decadent Cardinals, sex-crazed generals, blood-thirsty sapphic princesses, old hags gorging themselves with rats and corpses; villages, islands, military camps, the countryside burnt with napalm, roamed by the jeeps and tanks of the occupation army of Ecbatana (hard not to see France, the Métropole, in Guyotat's symbology), hordes of beastly partisans, trains carrying their load of prisoners to impromptu gas chambers; streets, imperial palaces, brothels, barracks in which any conceivable violence tenderness intercourse madness and holiness take place; herons, squirrels, butterflies, mountain streams, wild flowers, sandy winds, fiery sunsets and dawns; and the haunting, obsessive omnipresence of excrement, semen, blood, vomit, sweat, saliva - soaking the gutwrenching decay as well as the overwhelmingly beautiful landscapes, a lymph flowing through the veins of the world and all its creatures.
How is it possible to write more than 600 pages of obscenities without falling into pornography? How can anybody deal with the most astonishing acts of depravity, cruelty and insanity without ever using one single dirty word and displaying instead all the beauty of his mother tongue?
By being a poet.
This book is drenched in poetry; every single page of it ejaculates poetry in the reader's mental orifices. This is not reading, it's having unprotected sex with the deepest, darkest and truest part of yourself. Nobody writes like Guyotat does. This is the language of hallucinations and prophecies, with an unparalleled skill in describing human bodies and natural settings, noises and tastes and tactile feelings in beautifully crafted long-winded paragraphs made of short sentences in which reading becomes a sensory experience all of its own. The book's length is yet another means to create a hypnotic state in the reader, an ecstatic desensitisation of the mind - exhaustion leading to total vulnerability.
Guyotat's aim is to portray nature as it is: the harmony of amorality. In his universe there's absolutely no difference between humans, animals, vegetation, rocks and water; they're all part of one and the same cycle of creation and destruction, none of them ever really prevailing over the others. In the outskirts of a bombed village a man kills the cub of a wild beast that devours him before getting smashed to a pulp by a rock which subsequently crumbles under the tanks of an army doomed to be exterminated by the plague... on and on, life being constantly on the edge of a mass grave between Eden and Utopia, where any difference of race, status and morals becomes irrelevant (the title refers to the amount of casualties during the Algerian war of independence: civilians and soldiers, French and natives, OAS and rebels, tortured and torturers).
Honestly, I find it hard to understand the attitude of those readers who censure the horror without even sensing the poetry of these pages. Let's go to Isenheim and turn Grünewald's gangrenous, suppurating Christ into firewood in the name of decency; let's chop off David's dick. Pope Paul IV would be proud of us.
If beauty is in the eye of the beholder, so is ugliness.
As a matter of fact, innocence and guilt need each other in order to exist, and the hand drawing the line between the two is that of intent. Without intent there can be neither guilt nor sin.
Sin is the deliberate violation of what we have come to know and accept as a limit transcending the material dimension of civilisation. Sin and crime are therefore on two entirely different planes, and mixing the two would be a dangerous mistake. In the western world killing is always condemned as a sin, whereas it is not always punished as a crime. War, justice, medicine are allowed to murder us simply by allowing us to murder each other (the enemy we bomb, the prisoner we execute, the incurable sick we euthanise).
Such is the painful contradiction that has been at the core of our sense of guilt for at least 100.000 years, ever since we realised how devastatingly evil our potential is; how easily our civilisation(s) can blur the border between good and evil, to the point that the real judge of this world is basically our whimsical self, with all its misery and greatness.
Sin was created to prevent us from being the insane judges of our own madness.
We aren't sinning as long as we don't know - or refuse to acknowledge - the limit defining what sin is.
In Guyotat's world, neither psyche nor will do exist. It's the world before (or after) human beings became human; a dimension of humanness in which the psyche doesn't exist yet (or anymore), a state of grace beyond space and time where the human body and psychology are still (or finally) strangers to each other. Whenever history allows us to turn our soul into a blank slate, the elating trauma of freedom makes us cross that threshold and colonise the inland of our soul.
Do not look for an anti-war elegy here, do not hope in a political manifesto. References to the anachronistic imperialism of De Gaulle's France, the OAS, the depravity of freedom fighters keen on the same excesses perpetrated by the invaders are to be found here (along with flashbacks of Nazi-occupied Paris/Ecbatana), but they're definitely not the subject of Guyotat's visionary lyricism. What truly matters here is neither morality nor immorality: it's amorality, ergo the lack of both.
War is indeed only one of many possible scenarios for the author to stage the exhibition of all the horrors mankind has ever known, created, suffered and inflicted: war, pillage, rape, slavery , prostitution, murder, pedophilia, cannibalism, tyranny, madness... the world he depicts, the creatures he portrays are utterly devoid of any sense of guilt and shame. Beyond good and evil? No: beyond the very difference between the two. These are not human beings - they're only beings, indistinguishable from the wild beasts and barnyard animals around them, living in what can be both pre- and post-humanity.
Their passions and feelings are pure, untamed, unfettered.
They're innocent, and so are we.
This is the most devastating revelation ever. We can easily cope with guilt and punishment, but we'll always be terrified of innocence, especially our own.
"Ils ont fait l'horreur, qu'ils la voient maintenant, dégrisés et celle-ci ne leur appartenant plus."
Don't read this.
It's dangerous.
Poisonous.
It does something to you.
Oh, the things I did while reading this book... the way it affected me, dragging me down to those dark recesses I had always been either afraid or unaware of before I fell under the spell of Guyotat's insanity.
An insanity that happens to be mine too, as I inexorably morphed into one of his characters and got deliriously lost in that feeling - sinking deeper and deeper into my own private Algeria.
"Tomb for 500.000 Soldiers" touched me in a way no other book ever did. Thank God I didn't read this as a teenager. I'd be in jail now, getting raped on a daily basis by a whole block of tattooed inmates or fingering the guards in exchange for protection and books.
April 5, 2022
On violence against the human body, Carol J. Clover wrote:
“[It] evinces a fascination with flesh or meat itself as that which is hidden from view […] the realization that all that lies between the visible, knowable outside of the body and its secret insides is one thin membrane, protected only by the collective taboo against its violation.”
This violence is hard to convey through the written word. It’s easy to recount, easy to stage and reference, but the actual moment of pain and revelation, that transgression of the taboo that Clover writes about, that spilling over of the body, away from its Cartesian conceits of egocentric separation and into the rest of the cold and indifferent world—that moment is hard for words to mimic.
I think Guyotat comes incredibly close.
Of meat and its secrets, Guyotat seems only to know how to lay them bare, in abstract coils of blood and other liquids, with no rationale. The prose emulates the act of liquefying, of being brutalized, all while gesturing towards that world beyond human integrity—a world where thought does not reign, and instead the blood and tissue speak poems and lamentations of their own.
In constant, relentless, and disjointed vignettes, Guyotat enters into a dance of dangerous mimetics, of flirting closely with the unseeable, horrible atrocities that are not for most people to ever know. They enter the reader’s mind with a constant pumping, unknowable, unrecognizable, ugly, but with the distinct pungency of the abject rot that looms over each of our minds. It’s tedious as hell, but tedium has its uses, its powers—with tedium, we can grow to recognize a numbness that does feel a bit like death.
I feel exhausted after reading this, confronted in an immeasurable way. This book is an affront to the mind, a feverish dreaming of horrors, calcified by the passage of time, but thawed out by the unending power of their vexation, their unshakable grasp on our sensibilities.
Guyotat wanted us to get acquainted with that moment when the thin membrane (of our body, of propriety, of decency, of fabricated peace, of structural comfort) is punctured and the reality of calamity comes pouring out, and at least for me he succeeded. I do think every word here is drenched in the seepage of that violation.
“[It] evinces a fascination with flesh or meat itself as that which is hidden from view […] the realization that all that lies between the visible, knowable outside of the body and its secret insides is one thin membrane, protected only by the collective taboo against its violation.”
This violence is hard to convey through the written word. It’s easy to recount, easy to stage and reference, but the actual moment of pain and revelation, that transgression of the taboo that Clover writes about, that spilling over of the body, away from its Cartesian conceits of egocentric separation and into the rest of the cold and indifferent world—that moment is hard for words to mimic.
I think Guyotat comes incredibly close.
Of meat and its secrets, Guyotat seems only to know how to lay them bare, in abstract coils of blood and other liquids, with no rationale. The prose emulates the act of liquefying, of being brutalized, all while gesturing towards that world beyond human integrity—a world where thought does not reign, and instead the blood and tissue speak poems and lamentations of their own.
In constant, relentless, and disjointed vignettes, Guyotat enters into a dance of dangerous mimetics, of flirting closely with the unseeable, horrible atrocities that are not for most people to ever know. They enter the reader’s mind with a constant pumping, unknowable, unrecognizable, ugly, but with the distinct pungency of the abject rot that looms over each of our minds. It’s tedious as hell, but tedium has its uses, its powers—with tedium, we can grow to recognize a numbness that does feel a bit like death.
I feel exhausted after reading this, confronted in an immeasurable way. This book is an affront to the mind, a feverish dreaming of horrors, calcified by the passage of time, but thawed out by the unending power of their vexation, their unshakable grasp on our sensibilities.
Guyotat wanted us to get acquainted with that moment when the thin membrane (of our body, of propriety, of decency, of fabricated peace, of structural comfort) is punctured and the reality of calamity comes pouring out, and at least for me he succeeded. I do think every word here is drenched in the seepage of that violation.
June 2, 2011
In the introduction to this brutal book, the lengthy delay behind its appearance in English is explained, in part, on the original translator, one Helen Lane, having suffered a devastating spiritual crisis in the midst of her work. I have only read a portion of Tomb, but I can heartily sympathize with the trauma Ms. Lane must have endured. Guyotat pulls absolutely no punches in this lurid, liquid, loathsome, lacerating, libidinal word-splatter let loose from a mind raving in the upper limits of the mental atmosphere, where the oxygen has been bled and the colors curdle and dilute at the ephemeral limits of the void. I have heard it said that Guyotat received his inspiration by rocking a massive boner whilst he conjured forth his ideas, and it shows—the text is aswim in semen, the powerful dominating the powerless—male or female, adult or child—without compunction; every possible orifice is subjected to the penetration of a permanently-erect penis; all else is a feverish hallucination, the colors borrowed from those bizarre late-sixties Spider-Man cartoons in which the sky was locked in a war with itself. It is of a power and persistence to make Mailer's Ancient Evenings fade to a fey fancifulness in comparison. As far as literature goes, I consider myself to be of a strong stomach, and, at this point in my life, more-or-less unshockable; but Guyotat's brand of hyperaggressive, hypersexual mayhem is more than I can, or wish, to take. I'm giving it a trey because the writing is of a force, the imagery stunning, the concept of depicting the true horrors of (colonial) warfare, and its rarely faced link with sexual excitement and domination, something worthy of pursuing—it is just simply not for me. It is possible I may return to it at some point, but that's unlikely: there are far too many books waiting to be read that don't regularly punch me in the gut like Tomb did.
June 25, 2024
This explosive, disorientating work of fiction will appeal only to those with a questionable appetite for libidinal pandemonium and phantasmagoric cruelty. Set in the backdrop of a fictional war of liberation waged between the rebels and the occupying forces, each of the seven "chants" catalogue their collective descent into surrealist hell in comparison with which the most savage exchange of energies in nature appears to be an idyllic dream. Also, if you enjoy being pummeled into submission by mind-numbingly primitive prose for three hundred pages, then you definitely don't want to miss out on this gem. True to its title, Tomb for 500, 000 Soldiers is rather like a septic tank in which unsuspecting readers are condemned to drown in search for relics left behind by an absentee God. The world is His latrine.
ဟိုးအရင်ကတည်းက ဖတ်ဖို့ရည်ရွယ်ထားတဲ့ ပြင်သစ် transgressive fiction လက်ရာတချို့ကို ဒီနှစ်နွေရာသီမှာ တတ်နိုင်သလောက် အပြီးဖြတ်မယ်ဆိုပြီး Pierre Guyotat ရဲ့ Tomb for 500, 000 Soldiers ကို ကောက်ကိုင်လိုက်တာ မျှော်လင့်ထားသလောက် မမိုက်တော့ မနည်းကြိုးစားဖတ်လိုက်ရတယ်။ ပြည်တွင်းစစ်လိုမျိူး အခင်းအကျင်းကြီးထဲမှာ သာမန်အရပ်နေပြည်သူတွေရဲ့ စိတ်နဲ့ ခန္ဓာအားလုံး ငရဲတွင်းထဲ နည်းမျိုးစုံတွန်းပို့ အမြတ်ထုတ်ခံရပြီး လူသားရဲ့ ဇီဝကာမပျက်သုဉ်းသွားမှုအကြောင်းကို မျက်စိထဲလောင်မြိုက်သွားတဲ့အထိအောင်ထိထိမိမိသရုပ်ဖော်ထားတဲ့ Guyotat ရဲ့ အရေးအသားကြောင့် စာဖတ်ရှုသူတချို့ မအီမသာ ဖြစ်စေမှာတော့ အမှန်ပဲ။ ပြင်သစ်မူရင်းကနေ အင်္ဂလိပ်လို ဒုတိယအကြိမ် ဘာသာပြန်ဆိုထားတာဖြစ်တယ်။ ဝေါဟာရအသုံးအနှုန်းနဲ့ ရွေးချယ်မှုတွေ ပြောင်မြောက်ပေမယ့် prose ကတော့ ဖတ်ရတာ နည်းနည်းငြီးငွေ့စရာကောင်းတယ်လို့ပဲ ဆိုရမလား၊ "ထိုသူက ဒါလုပ်သည်" "ထိုအရာများက ထိုသူထံ ဖြစ်သွားသည်" စတဲ့ မှတ်စုတိုထုတ်သလို description တွေနဲ့ပဲ အစကနေ အဆုံးအထိ လုပ်စားသွားတယ်။ တကယ်တော့ Tomb ဝတ္ထုထဲက ဇာတ်ကောင်တွေအားလုံးက ဘုရားသခင် နောက်ဖေးစွန့်ဖို့တူးထားတဲ့ ကျင်းထဲက လောက်ကောင်တွေပမာ။ ခက်တာက ဘုရားသခင် ဝမ်းချုပ်နေတာ အင်မတန်ကြာခဲ့ပြီလေ။
ဟိုးအရင်ကတည်းက ဖတ်ဖို့ရည်ရွယ်ထားတဲ့ ပြင်သစ် transgressive fiction လက်ရာတချို့ကို ဒီနှစ်နွေရာသီမှာ တတ်နိုင်သလောက် အပြီးဖြတ်မယ်ဆိုပြီး Pierre Guyotat ရဲ့ Tomb for 500, 000 Soldiers ကို ကောက်ကိုင်လိုက်တာ မျှော်လင့်ထားသလောက် မမိုက်တော့ မနည်းကြိုးစားဖတ်လိုက်ရတယ်။ ပြည်တွင်းစစ်လိုမျိူး အခင်းအကျင်းကြီးထဲမှာ သာမန်အရပ်နေပြည်သူတွေရဲ့ စိတ်နဲ့ ခန္ဓာအားလုံး ငရဲတွင်းထဲ နည်းမျိုးစုံတွန်းပို့ အမြတ်ထုတ်ခံရပြီး လူသားရဲ့ ဇီဝကာမပျက်သုဉ်းသွားမှုအကြောင်းကို မျက်စိထဲလောင်မြိုက်သွားတဲ့အထိအောင်ထိထိမိမိသရုပ်ဖော်ထားတဲ့ Guyotat ရဲ့ အရေးအသားကြောင့် စာဖတ်ရှုသူတချို့ မအီမသာ ဖြစ်စေမှာတော့ အမှန်ပဲ။ ပြင်သစ်မူရင်းကနေ အင်္ဂလိပ်လို ဒုတိယအကြိမ် ဘာသာပြန်ဆိုထားတာဖြစ်တယ်။ ဝေါဟာရအသုံးအနှုန်းနဲ့ ရွေးချယ်မှုတွေ ပြောင်မြောက်ပေမယ့် prose ကတော့ ဖတ်ရတာ နည်းနည်းငြီးငွေ့စရာကောင်းတယ်လို့ပဲ ဆိုရမလား၊ "ထိုသူက ဒါလုပ်သည်" "ထိုအရာများက ထိုသူထံ ဖြစ်သွားသည်" စတဲ့ မှတ်စုတိုထုတ်သလို description တွေနဲ့ပဲ အစကနေ အဆုံးအထိ လုပ်စားသွားတယ်။ တကယ်တော့ Tomb ဝတ္ထုထဲက ဇာတ်ကောင်တွေအားလုံးက ဘုရားသခင် နောက်ဖေးစွန့်ဖို့တူးထားတဲ့ ကျင်းထဲက လောက်ကောင်တွေပမာ။ ခက်တာက ဘုရားသခင် ဝမ်းချုပ်နေတာ အင်မတန်ကြာခဲ့ပြီလေ။
Read
February 23, 2017Got my hands on this about a decade and change late. There were those months of Ballard, Burroughs, Gysin, Kenneth Anger, hash, ReSearch publications, Octave Mirbeau, Foucault, Bataille, Lautreamonte, hash, wine, S.P.K., Verlaine, &c. This would have been a welcome addition. It's a shame it's so rare, expensive, and not because of the absolute worst typesetting I've ever seen, but because this book would make the perfect Christmas gift for unsupecting oafs. 500, 000 Soldiers is a psychological machine gunning.
June 27, 2017
Full Review
This is an incredible book, and it's a shame the English translation is out of print. I hope either a new translation or a re-release of this one will be done in the near future.
This is an incredible book, and it's a shame the English translation is out of print. I hope either a new translation or a re-release of this one will be done in the near future.
February 26, 2021
My review can’t do this work of art justice. One of the most beautiful things I’ve ever read.
August 27, 2020
Müharibə budur...
January 5, 2025
"In slaughter and in fire, in laughter and relaxation while questioning, we bend forward, we vibrate, we weather like stones. And you love me, you want to change my sharp-pointed cock into a child’s hand, change my glaring jaw into a casket for your tears; I, stone crushing thee my ploughed earth, fire burns all round and do not burn me, sweat hits us, and here we are wandering in the night sky and suddenly twisted and whirling towards the rising sun, towards the zone of silence where all the clashes of the battle assemble and sink into the ground"
This was probably my most challenging read yet, not so much because of the blood, sperm and shit-smeared content matter or the fragmented, hallucinatory and surreal writing style, but because of the lack of a proper, readable copy of this monument to war and human abjection at the time I started with it. That was almost four years ago, and now, after several lapses of inactivity, I can say I'm glad I didn't pay $500 or more for a used book. Eden, Eden, Eden, being a sort of condensed (just one paragraph *wink*) version of Tomb..., remains my favorite work by Guyotat.
This was probably my most challenging read yet, not so much because of the blood, sperm and shit-smeared content matter or the fragmented, hallucinatory and surreal writing style, but because of the lack of a proper, readable copy of this monument to war and human abjection at the time I started with it. That was almost four years ago, and now, after several lapses of inactivity, I can say I'm glad I didn't pay $500 or more for a used book. Eden, Eden, Eden, being a sort of condensed (just one paragraph *wink*) version of Tomb..., remains my favorite work by Guyotat.
December 28, 2025
It wasn't very good but it was the funniest book I've ever read.
Absurdly grotesque. I don't doubt that war is like that (I've seen some footage and read a lot on it, it is really awful), it's just the way this Frenchie wrote it made it sound like a low-quality gorefest movie made by a really horny and creepy guy. As one person said under here, you don't have to explicitly describe several child rape scene to tell me war is bad. There other parts of war you can focus on dude.
I do however appreciate the scene of the one soldier masturbating to a cut out picture of some lady and one the cooks (who I fucking hope is of age, the way the author described each gay sex scene and hetero scenes is predatory as hell) giving one of the generals a blowjob. The way it was written was so vomit-inducing, with how vivid every muscle twitch is described, just as how I like my sex scenes written. Sex is gross bro. Fuck sex!!!!
Absurdly grotesque. I don't doubt that war is like that (I've seen some footage and read a lot on it, it is really awful), it's just the way this Frenchie wrote it made it sound like a low-quality gorefest movie made by a really horny and creepy guy. As one person said under here, you don't have to explicitly describe several child rape scene to tell me war is bad. There other parts of war you can focus on dude.
I do however appreciate the scene of the one soldier masturbating to a cut out picture of some lady and one the cooks (who I fucking hope is of age, the way the author described each gay sex scene and hetero scenes is predatory as hell) giving one of the generals a blowjob. The way it was written was so vomit-inducing, with how vivid every muscle twitch is described, just as how I like my sex scenes written. Sex is gross bro. Fuck sex!!!!
September 24, 2021
I am probably bias because I heavily back this cascading, visceral, psuedo-other-worldy narrative telling that Guyotat is (extremely fairly) known for. Characters entrances, exits, and returns pull the plot through neverending action. There's much to say about psychologial / symbolic presence of violence and I'm sure others have unpacked Tomb for ... and Eden, Eden, Eden in parallels to the war in Algiers much more elequently than I can.
The written style is over burdening at most times, in a way I feel builds the environment and atmosphere efficiently. Aesthetically, I'm obsessed. I constantly think about what reading Guyotat in French would be like.
I would say it is not for the "faint of heart" or to be taken at face value. However, it is 100% a work of art.
The written style is over burdening at most times, in a way I feel builds the environment and atmosphere efficiently. Aesthetically, I'm obsessed. I constantly think about what reading Guyotat in French would be like.
I would say it is not for the "faint of heart" or to be taken at face value. However, it is 100% a work of art.
Read
July 17, 2023An edgy series of prose poems about a merciless war. Blood drinking, rape, etc. A nightmare world of masters and slaves in perpetual conflict. Presumably the writer is anti-Fascist. There is no discernable theme. The sex and violence is pornographic. There are cocks on every page. Cocks pressed against stones, cocks being grabbed, etc. There is no discernable plot. It is an exercise in literary style.
September 27, 2024
There was some intense and poetic imagery and language in use here, the picture that Guyotat paints of war and humanity's darkest desires is an absolutely hellish one, and really losing yourself in this novel can be a dark experience. At the same time wallowing in the dregs like this becomes repetitive, maybe that is part of the point and the act of becoming desensitized to such horrors over the course of 500 pages is saying something about the human tendency to normalize the inhuman, but as an exercise in reading it started to become a bit of a slog.
September 28, 2021
Excellent book
March 14, 2023
For a book about cock it sure has no point.
March 21, 2025
We can all conclude that war is dehumanizing without reading 500 pages of sadistic child porn.
Read
October 30, 2025Désolé c’est vraiment vraiment trop IMMONDE
will-not-finish
October 12, 2016I'm approaching this with some caution... Don't know if I'll read it through, but I'm struggling with it a bit so far (10 pages read).
May 8, 2023
Unreadable William Burroughs ripoff claptrap. But if you like Burroughs you may fancy this load of nonsense.
May 11, 2025
One of, if not the most, poignant, bizarre depictions of utter bleakness and brutality ever. Exhausting to read but captivating and beautiful.
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