ABSTRACT
The French novelist Pierre Guyotat raises disturbing questions about violence, lasciviousness, intellectual liberty, and the future of human society. This novelist, who was nicknamed 'Doudou' in childhood because of his gentleness, has provoked scandals with nearly every book, and not just Eden, Eden, Eden, which was banned between 1970 and 1981 in a rare case of censorship in post-war France. Perspectives on Guyotat's realism, materialism, aesthetics, and never relinquished search for divine sparks of some sort, are opened up in Musiques, his commentaries on classical and contemporary music, originally broadcast as a special series on the national radio station France Culture. In her biography, Catherine Brun delineates the lives of Guyotat's several other prominent relatives. In Guyotat's mature novels, 'processes' (action) and the epic viewpoint are primordial. Instead of traditional plots, his fictions exhibit long sequences of brief, distinct acts that force the reader to contemplate humanity in its most rudimentary and repugnant postures.
