Pierre Guyotat (1940–2020)

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 show more an exercise in reading it started to become a bit of a slog. show less

This is an abrasive deluge of images depicting disease, starvation, rape, and sexual degradation. It is scene after scene of suffering and depravity, this barrage and some jumbled characters its only thin semblance of plot. There is no punctuation, but quite a bit of alliteration. It's borderline unreadable, but it's digestible in the most unpleasant sense of the word. It's an enema to void your sense of morality or your belief in hope. Honestly though, what would be the first thing you show more would write after you were kept in a hole in the ground for three months? show less

Unbelievable, rich, resourceful, often brilliant self-regard. I wonder if any author has ever looked at himself from inside such a cocoon of self-praise. "No one before me, and in this language, has written as I write, as I dare to write, as it is my pleasure and my plenitude... It is already hard enough that this world, my world, cannot be reproduced, because of its sexual power, even in future anthologies!" (pp. 181-83) Guyotat's monumental sense of his genius makes the late Saul Bellow show more (embalmed in the certainty of his immortality) look like the late Woody Allen (encased in the certitude of his genius, but also embarrassed like the comic he needs to be). Of course it's understandable that someone praised by "Michel Leiris, Roland Barthes and Philippe Sollers... Michel Foucault... Pier Paolo Pasolini, Jean-Paul Sartre, Pierre Boulez, Joseph Beuys, Pierre Dac, Jean Genet, Joseph Kessel, Maurice Blanchot, Max Ernst, Italo Calvino, Jacques Monod, Simone de Beauvoir... Nathalie Sarraute... François Mitterrand... Georges Pompidou, [and] Claude Simon" (that's from Wikipedia) would hold himself in high regard. But it's also necessary note that radically explicit homoerotic prose and an incarceration in Algeria are practically passports for praise in the minds of mid-twentieth century French writers.

Aside from those hyperbolic moments of self-praise, what is there? A very human, warm, and affecting love for nearly everything; and many echoes of Lautréamont, Rimbaud, Genet, and Céline. The book doesn't actually describe the author's coma until ten pages from the end, and it says remarkably little that might help us understand his descent into the coma. There's a lot of talk about his addiction to an over-the-counter painkiller, and many mentions of his dwindling weight. But his sexual encounters are described so coyly that they're actually puzzling. (Why did he have to leave Orléans, exactly? And why don't we get to hear the reason, given that Guyotat is so famous for writing explicitly?) And the book has next to no direction: there is no sense, as the book goes on, of any reason why he should be declining so drastically.

These are reasons why it is important, even for important writers, not to love yourself too much. show less

This is a text which was almost immediately banned on its publication in France in 1970 - and it is apparently to François Mitterand's extreme culture and refinement (I mean this genuinely) that we owe its return into the public zone a decade or so later. I have to say that I found this translation into English almost unreadable, a savage and relentless stream of semi-consciousness marked by filth and delirious obscenity, disordered syntax, and a lack of punctuation of any kind. That is to show more say, it is conceived at least in part as a deliberate subversion of aesthetic, literary, and moral norms: I think we owe it to the author to allow the aptness of this style to his conceptualisation of the subject - which doesn't mean we have to think he achieves it entirely well. The text evokes the abjectness and exasperation of war; it is a semi-memoir from the author's years in Algeria - and it is completely proper for a French voice to make utterance against some of what went on there; the sexual undercurrents of human violence pervade these words, as do the sultry north-African heat and dust. 'Eden, Eden, Eden' is provocative and no doubt offensive, certainly perverse: it resembles, however, the deranged rantings of a madman far more than 'pornography' of any normal kind. The manuscript itself - apparently mismatched sheets of paper marked as much by blood and sweat and sperm as by pen and ink - is undoubtedly an artefact of genuine interest and value. I think that something intrinsic is lost in the transcription to orderliness and print - and the voice which I had thought might make a counterpoint with that of Jean Genet, whose underworld turns to something sublime and poetic on the page, here screams in something like wild abstraction, accommodated to none of our conceptual demands. It is our continued vexation with its otherness from, and antagonism against, our own sense of propriety and right and wrong which may be the value of this book more than its text. Unless it is meant simply to revolt, or to deride all sense of meaning at all. For me, the idea of this book is more interesting than its actuality. show less