Tomb for 500,000 Soldiers (The Modern Classics Series)

This is the first English translation of French writer, Pierre Guyotat's legendary novel, which was recently included in Le Monde 's "100 Greatest Novels of the 20th Century." A violent collision of brutal warfare and sexual ecstasy, Guyotat is said to have hallucinated the subject matter as a young soldier during the Algerian war, where the novel is set. Pierre Guyotat was born in France in 1940. His most recent book is Progenitors (Gallimard, 2000). "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. Completed when its author was only twenty-five and never before published in English - the only copy of a previous translation was destroyed by fire - it now appears in a new version which retains all of the original's detonating sensory power." "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, Lautreamont's "Maldoror" and Luis Bunuel'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." "Every more relevant as the terror-torn 21st century unfurls, 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"."--BOOK JACKET [by Pierre Guyotat ; Translated By Romain Slocombe ; With An Introduction By Stephen Barber].