Idiocy

An audacious, unabashedly transgressive memoir about two acts of escape by the author: breaking from his family to seek a freer life in Paris and then, later, deserting 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 extreme linguistic experimentation 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 as well as his 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.

With unflinching honesty, Guyotat recounts the atrocities he witnessed firsthand during the war, as well as his own harrowing experience of being arrested for ostensibly inciting desertion and imprisoned in a hole in the ground for three months. Guyotat wields his prose like a scalpel, merciless in his excavation of the sensations and textures of human brutality--yet also generous and moving in his depictions of comradery and friendship.

Winner of the 2018 Prix Médicis, this bracing, hallucinatory narrative is both an incisive condemnation of violence and colonialism, and an invaluable key to the oeuvre of a writer hailed by Edmund White as ＂one of the few geniuses of our day.＂

Pierre Guyotat (1940-2020) wrote his first novel in 1960, was called to fight in the Algerian War that same year, and was found guilty of desertion in 1962. After his release from jail, he was a source of French literary scandal throughout the 1960s and ’70s. The French government banned his novel Eden Eden Eden from being publicized, advertised on posters, or sold to anyone under the age of 18 from the time of its publication in 1970 until 1981. Idiocy, his final book, won the Prix Médicis in 2018.

Peter Behrman de Sinéty grew up in Maine and teaches English at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris. He is the translator of Maël Renouard’s Fragments of an Infinite Memory, published by New York Review Books in 2021.