Prostitution

by Pierre Guyotat, Pierre Donalbain, Unknown Author

Pierre Guyotat's extraordinary novel of 1975, a vast enumeration of sexual acts accumulating and multiplying in an Algerian urban landscape, where every orgasm has its exact price and where every prostitute is one fuck away from death, Prostitution creates its own corporeal language of sex, stripped violently to the bone, inflicting impact upon impact on the reader's neural system. Revered in his native France, Guyotat remains an unprecedented literary figure, creating work of absolute originality.

Unknown Binding

First published January 1, 1975

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

[E. Artyom · Rating 1 out of 5]

If in the future everyone can become famous for 15 minutes, then the artistic value of such celebrities will be 15. Rubles, minutes, centimeters? It doesn't matter.

The value of this novel is exactly those same 15 centimeters, if we are talking about the size of the penis. Or 15 kilograms, if we are talking about feces. In general, the text is a canvas of men of different colors and different preferences having sex in an Algerian brothel. Yes, there is a lot of specific argot and words that probably only existed in this area and sank into oblivion along with it during the heyday of AIDS. But all this was already in the author's two previous novels, the themes are the same - sex as violence, violence as power, use hate for freedom, use power for power, as another well-known apologist for this topic, Michael Gira, sang. It is impossible to get excited by this text. It can also cause disgust, only if you read something like this for the first time. This is not transgressive literature, and it also hardly resembles the author's erotic fantasies. Again and again he tries to make the reader think with rather monotonous techniques, but all that happens is to skim / get bored / skip. What am I getting at? The moment this book was first read, it had already lost its artistic value. Its 15 minutes were not an bang, but a whimper.