For the last 10 years, with Explanations and even more so since Coma, Pierre Guyotat has been communicating a different voice from the one that he imposed on the literary landscape at the end of the 1960s. Different from that of Graves for Five Hundred Thousand Soldiers, from Eden, Eden, texts "in language" closer to the poem and the song than to a narrative as it is commonly defined. If he is still writing in that style that characterises him, he has concurrently undertaken the "most accessible" narrative in "normative" French of certain episodes of his life. Background is part of this. In it, the author brings up how he learned about writing and sex, not in an ordinary autobiography, but in a prodigious musical phrase.
latest work published: Arrière-fond (Background), Gallimard 2010