Idiocy

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.＂

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.