Guyotat's text overpowers and oppresses us with the most elementary fact: life is disgusting. The text consists of a single uninterrupted paragraph of 181 pages describing in excruciatingly minute mechanical detail an unending series of copulatory acts without any seeming point but to emphasize the slime, stench, and excretions of living bodies. The situation, however, seems to be this: a sort of camp town in the desert, a brothel of male prostitutes, and the soldiers ((of an unnamed conflict)) drillers ((of oil or ore it's unspecified)) and assorted nomads and shepherds who wander in from the surrounding wastelands to use them.
What's this book about?-again, in Barthes words, it's a "free text," by which he means it's pointless to look for "meaning" in terms of the conventional paradigms of character, plot, theme, symbolism, etc. In this case, there's no really good way to answer the question, "Whatcha reading there?" For that matter, you might even want to shield this text from the eyes of your casually curious over-the-shoulder reader on the morning train. You'll just want to make certain you're alone in a soundproof room if you dare to read these words outside your own mind.
Read aloud, *Eden* has the rhythm of a monologue wired directly to the heart of darkness. Or, one should take the advice of the preeminent French critic Roland Barthes in the introduction when he writes that *Eden Eden Eden* must be "entered, not by believing it, becoming party to an illusion, participating in a fantasy, but by writing the language in place, signing it along with him." I might also suggest *singing* along with Guyotat because *Eden Eden Eden* has a uniquely intoxicating incantatory quality whose power is as much viscerally musical as it is appallingly visual.
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