Pierre Guyotat

Pierre Guyotat (9 January 1940 – 7 February 2020) was a French literary avant-garde writer who wrote fiction, non-fiction, and plays.

[2] In 1962 he was charged with complicity in desertion, damaging the morale of the army, and was held incommunicado in an underground prison for three months without trial, then transferred to a disciplinary unit.

[citation needed] In 1967, he published Tombeau pour cinq cent mille soldats (later released in English as Tomb for 500,000 Soldiers).

[7] Based on his ordeal as a soldier in the Algerian War, the book earned a cult reputation and became the subject of various controversies, mostly because of its omnipresent sexual obsessions and homoeroticism.

[3] A petition of international support[5] was signed by Pier Paolo Pasolini, Jean-Paul Sartre, Pierre Boulez, Joseph Beuys, Pierre Dac, Jean Genet, Simone de Beauvoir, Joseph Kessel, Maurice Blanchot, Max Ernst, Italo Calvino, Jacques Monod, and Nathalie Sarraute.

[3] According to reviewer Ron Slate, According to American critic Ron Slate, "Drawing from his Algerian experiences, the text comprises one continuous sentence (scored with backslashes, brackets, semicolons and commas), an intoned catalog of military atrocities, communal humiliations, unsated lust, and miscellanea running 192 pages".

One of those cases was of great importance for him: he personally helped Mohamed Laïd Moussa, a 24-year-old Algerian ex-teacher who was accused and then found guilty of unintentional murder in Marseilles.

They still explore the possibility of worlds structured by sexual slavery and transgression of fundamental taboos, but the French language is distorted, and ellipses of letters or words, neologisms, and phonetic transcriptions of Arabic utterances make it difficult to understand.

[citation needed] In 1977, while working on Le Livre (1984) and Histoire de Samora Machel (unpublished), he suffered a psychiatric illness.

[5] In January 2000 he was involved in the reopening of the Centre Georges Pompidou at Beaubourg in Paris, contributing a reading of the first pages of Progénitures [fr].

The event, celebrating the 50th anniversary of Guyotat's book, comprised 50 readings around the world, by a diverse group of creatives, including artists Paul McCarthy and Kaari Upson; writer Chris Kraus; and rapper Abd al Malik.

It also included a new film by Australian filmmaker Amiel Courtin-Wilson; a performance by artist Michael Dean; a reading by Philippe Parreno in Berlin; and a concert by Scott McCulloch in Tbilisi.