Idiocy

By Pierre Guyotat

"Pierre Guyotat (1940–2020) was a French avant-garde novelist and playwright notable for his widely controversial and groundbreaking work. His novel Eden Eden Eden was banned by the French government. For Coma, his “cruelly lucid” memoir, he wrote from such a state of hyper-volatility and obsession that he had to be hospitalized. In Idiocy, recently resurrected by the indispensable NYRB Classics, Guyotat’s captivating work of memory recounts dreams and terrors of childhood, adolescent fear and fevers, and the “filth of fighting” during the Algerian War—including his own experience of being arrested for inciting desertion and imprisoned in a hole in the ground for three months. Compared with the extreme early work, which often pushed language to (and beyond) its limits, Idiocy seems to strike a kinder, trancelike tone. While still utterly uncompromising in its intense depiction of “the brutality of the world,” it is also written in a woundingly lyrical style (without poetic pretense) and an almost childlike freedom and resolve."
–Herbert Pföstl

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."

2025; paperback; 8" x 5"; 208 pages; ISBN: 9781681379197.