TOMB FOR 500,000 SOLDIERS [Together With] EDEN, EDEN, EDEN

np: Creation Books, 2003. 1st Printings. Trade paperback. Light shelfwear. Near Fine. Two Volumes. 378; 163pp. Two cult classics. From the library of Patrick J. Kearney, with his small name sticker at the bottom of the verso of the front cover. For 500,000 Soldiers is 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. 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, Lautréamont's Maldoror and Luis Buñuel'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. 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". Pierre Guyotat was born in 1940 in a remote mountainous region of south-western France. He spent much of the 1960s in North Africa, as a soldier in the colonial war between France and Algeria, and then travelling in a camper van. His novel, 'Eden, Eden, Eden' (1970), caused a huge scandal and was censored.