Tomb for 500,000 Soldiers

Guyotat's unique elision of brutal warfare and sexual ecstasy is regularly claimed as the greatest French novel of modern times. 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.