IDIOCY

The horror, the horror.

Pierre Guyotat (1940-2000) was an experimentalist French writer whose autobiographical essays, novels, and plays were so graphically explicit that some of his work was banned by the French government. His service in the Algerian War in 1960 shaped his politics and personality: anti-authoritarian, pushing the French language to its limits of meaning, and fascinated by the filth of fighting, illness, and recovery. This memoir of his experiences from the late 1950s to the early 1960s won the 2018 Prix Médicis, an award for authors “whose fame does not yet match their talent.” The book’s descriptive grotesqueness will tax even the most open-minded of readers. Excrement is everywhere. Body fluids ooze. Dreamscapes of a rural French childhood stand alongside nightmares of war. The long, central essay of the book, “Exodus,” begins with soldiers lounging, the writer coming out of imprisonment, and the very landscape taking on a threatening, bodily form. Who knows what is happening here? “Pieces of Barbary fig limbs in long heaps ahead of us, their rotting fruit covered in flies, thorns untouched: Should we walk over them to continue on?” Someone or something is always being violated. “The light reddens, the shadows hasten over the groves, the rocks…a bosom pokes forth, half out of its camisole, a shoulder bare beneath the strap, a cheek, a profile; eyelashes blink, a mouth half opens, nostrils flare, a scent of fresh shampoo, a hand descends between a pair of thighs, against light shorts: dangerous days, everything that can be cut, gouged, slashed, tugged out from inside the body, beaten, cut to pieces, ripped, burnt, must be defended.” Without an introduction from the translator, and with no notes to guide us through this writing, the book remains a weathered, almost illegible signpost on the desert pathways of the avant-garde.

An ugly, terrifying memoir of childhood, war, and violation, rendered into nightmarish English.