Idiocy

In this feverish memoir, French avant-garde novelist Guyotat (In the Deep), who died in 2020, recounts his coming-of-age amid war, squalor, and sexual obsession. The opening section recaps 18-year-old Guyotat’s move to Paris in 1958, where he held dead-end jobs that paid barely enough for a diet of bread and peanut oil while he worked at becoming a writer. He was mesmerized by Parisian women, their erotic allure sometimes heightened by uncleanliness, as with “the lice girl,” whom he met at a homeless encampment. The action then moves to Guyotat’s stint fighting in France’s war against Algerian rebels, where his antiauthoritarian streak got him court-martialed and imprisoned for private writings that voiced support for Algerian independence. Guyotat’s sexual frustration continued in Algeria in the 1960s, climaxing in a hallucinatory, 40-page encounter with a woman that was ultimately blocked by her knife-wielding brother. Guyotat’s reminiscences explore religion, manhood, and his family’s participation in the Resistance during WWII, but his primary fixation is sex, whose blend of glory and grossness he sees as being the life-affirming antidote to violence and death. Guyotat’s Proustian, detail-rich prose teems with his neuroses, resulting in a lurid account that—while borderline exhausting—is undeniably arresting. It’s a trip. (Oct.)