Tomb for 500,000 soldiers

Tomb For 500,000 Soldiers‚ Pierre Guyotat’s unique elision of brutal warfare and sexual ecstasy, is regularly acclaimed as the greatest French novel of modern times. Completed when its author was only twenty-five and never before published in English. the only copy of a previous translation was destroyed by fire it now appears in a brilliant new version which retains all of the original’s detonating sensory power. Guyotat hallucinated the subject matter of the novel as a young soldier during the Algerian War, gazing out from a watchtower over the desert at night. Compacting together elements from mythology, Lautréamont’s Maldoror and Luis Buñuel’s film Los Olvidados, he assembled a vision of contemporary life as a relentless display of slavery, prostitution and degradation, in which only catastrophic eruptions of atrocity and the delirious intervention of depraved sex acts can possess meaning for the book’s lacerated human figures.
Tomb For 500,000 Soldiers is a headlong ride of exhilaration and horror which precipitates the reader into extreme, uncharted psycho-sexual terrain, a zone Guyotat himself has alluded to as “the anus of the world”. Pierre Guyotat was born in 1940 in a remote mountainous region of south-western France. He spent much of the 1960s in North Africa, as a soldier in the colonial war between France and Algeria, and then travelling in a camper van. His novel, ‘Eden, Eden, Eden’ (1970), caused a huge scandal and was censored. He spent nine years writing his most recent book, ‘Progenitors’ (2000). A legendary figure in France, he has also done many collaborations with film-makers, dancers and painters. He lives in Paris.