Tomb for 500,000 Soldiers
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. It was completed when its author was only twenty-five and never before published in English, with the only copy of a previous translation was destroyed by fire. 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."