Idiocy by Pierre Guyotat

An audacious, unabashedly transgressive memoir about two acts of escape by the author: rebelling aginst his family to seek a freer life in Paris and then, later, from 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."

REVIEWS

"Pierre Guyotat is the prince of prose." —Alain Badiou

"Guyotat renders the obscene violence of colonialism with unflinching honesty. His writing is gorgeous, brutally poetic without pretense or over-aestheticization. 'Insects scuttle between my fingers like words that escape me.' I didn't just read Idiocy, I was captured by it. It is a book that throws off your blinders, that changes you." —Dodie Bellamy

"Idiocy, as a work of memoir, maintains an uncanny sobriety throughout its reportage, indulgent in its poetical description . . . As a medium intended to survey war and warmongering, Idiocy becomes more than a simple pulling back of the curtain of atrocity; it would, instead, pull down the whole damned rigging, lights, cameras, and all." —Blake Butler

PRODUCT DETAILS
Paperback
Publisher: NYRB Classics
ISBN: 978-1681379197
Pages: 208