Idiocy

by Pierre Guyotat, Peter Behrman de Sinéty (translator)

An audacious, unabashedly transgressive memoir about two acts of escape by the author: breaking from his family to seek a freer life in Paris and then, later, deserting the French military during the Algerian War.

Pierre Guyotat was one of the most radical and uncompromising writers of the twentieth century, a literary successor to Sade, Bataille, and Genet whose visceral fictions and bold experiments with language have earned him cult status in France and abroad. Idiocy is his searing memoir of coming of age between 1958 and 1962, when he discovered his burgeoning sexuality and aptitude for rebellion—first against his father, whom he escaped to become a writer in Paris, then against the French military authorities as a conscript in the Algerian War.

Guyotat recounts the atrocities he witnessed first-hand in Algeria, as well as his own harrowing experience of being arrested for inciting desertion and imprisoned in a hole in the ground for three months. Guyotat wields his language like a scalpel, merciless in his exploration of human brutality in all its horrible, granular detail. Yet his generous depictions of camaraderie and friendship are just as unflinching.

The winner of the 2018 Prix Médicis, Idiocy is an incisive condemnation of violence and colonialism, and a bracing, hallucinatory late masterpiece from a writer hailed by Edmund White as "one of the few geniuses of our day."

Genres: France, Nonfiction, Memoir

208 pages, Paperback

First published August 29, 2018

About the author

Born 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.

Reviews

[Bernard Convert · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ce qui m'étonne c'est que, en ces temps de bien-pensance et de politiquement correct, ce livre ait obtenu tant de prix. Il est tout aussi dérangeant que ceux qui lui avaient valu la censure dans les années 70. Comme chez Sade ou Artaud ou Bataille on est parfois à la limite du lisible.

[Jean-Pascal · Rating 3 out of 5]

Une lecture âpre, difficile et belle qui m'a en définitive peu touché. Un bon quart du livre avant la fin est resté bien énigmatique.

[Jeanne Martin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Je m'attendais à trouver ce livre rebutant, mais en réalité j'ai été portée par le récit, autobiographique, écrit dans un style qui évoque la brutalité : il "manque" des mots dans les phrases, elles sont rapides et souvent rompues, filant à l'essentiel sans s'embarrasser de fluidité, de connecteurs.
Mais on comprend. On a le sentiment d'être immergé dans la subjectivité de l'auteur, on partage sa colère, son désespoir, sa soif de sexe, sa peur de se lancer.
Ca vaut le coup. Ca m'émerveille moins que Céline ou Claude Simon, mais c'est quand même un sacré morceau.
J'ai envie d'en lire d'autres.

[Gilles Russeil · Rating 3 out of 5]

Recit autobiographique de l'entrée en âge adulte de l'auteur au début des années 1960. Complexe toujours, obscur parfois, très - trop - écrit. On s'accroche, on est parfois récompensé, parfois épuisé et dérouté.

[Chiara Moioli · Rating 5 out of 5]

Pierre, feral savant, I am mauled meat in your clenched jaws.

[OT · Rating 1 out of 5]

Dur dur la lecture. Entrecoupé, haletant, décousu: sautant d’une époque à l’autre et d’un décor à un autre. Difficile à lire. Fatiguant. Sensuel, oui, parfois. Cru, oui, souvent.
Abandonné à la page 50!

[JediCaligula89 · Rating 3 out of 5]

This memoir starts really good and then in the last 70 pages it just becomes an absolute mess. The prose is fantastic but some of the grotesque imagery is a bit much to me