Fable for Another Time

"A defiant cri du coeur that attacked the hypocrisies of nearly everyone except [Celine's] dead mother, his cat and his wife. This autobiographical novel ... is now available in English for the first time... In this canny translation by Mary Hudson, Celine's tone-a strangely endearing combination of self-awareness and black humor-ultimately wins your admiration if not always your sympathy."-Dan Kaufman, New York Times Book Review -- Dan Kaufman New York Times Book Review "Although the political thrusts, the literary asides and the paranoid imaginings-that his wife is being seduced by a legless artist-are great fun (and much else is wonderfully explained in Hudson's introduction and notes), it is the sheer human content, the consolation of not being alone at the extreme, that brings at least this reader back again and again to Celine... Fable is Celine's rasping tortured cry, faithful to the moment he is describing 50 years ago and yet presciently capturing the foreboding contained in the headlines of today's newspaper. The awfulness, his work says to us, never goes away."-Thomas McGonigle, Los Angeles Times Book Review -- Thomas McGonigle Los Angeles Times Book Review "Fable for Another Time was Celine's new literary beginning. It set the stage for a subsequent trilogy of postwar novels... Since then, Celine's stature has only grown: In France today he is ranked with Proust as the leading novelist of the 20th century... More than his famous use of slang, his fragmented sentences or his punctuation, it is Celine's effect on the reader that makes his novels so radically different from the well-mannered French fiction of his contemporaries... Translating his voice was Mary Hudson's daunting task... She understands Celine's writing but resists the temptation to paraphrase and explain. And she gives us Celine in a language that is more colloquial, more contemporary."-Alice Kaplan, Washington Post Book World -- Alice Kaplan Washington Post Book World "Civilized society is portrayed as a constant threat to individual freedom in this savage text-the previously untranslated first half of a two-part novel the perversely great French author (1894-1961) published in 1952...The energy and rhythm of the narrator's voice are intoxicating, but the content is so off-putting, you may hate yourself for not tossing it into the trash. Exactly the effect intended, we imagine, by one of the 20th century's most eloquent and incorrigible misanthropes."-Kirkus Reviews Kirkus Reviews "On the surface, it may look and sound like many of his other works, especially the later novels. Hudson argues that it's much more subtle than that, but I think the similarity is important. I've long felt that Celine only wrote one novel, but that it was several thousand pages long and doled out in small portions. That's why the publication of Fable for Another Time is so important for those of us who can't read French. Until now, it's been the chapter that was missing-the link, the foot-bridge that connects everything else. Short as it is, it might be the most important novel he ever wrote."-Jim Knipfel, New York Press -- Jim Knipfel New York Press "In a foreword Godard describes Celine's spell in prison in Denmark when he worked on Feerie, pitting his language against the sounds of the prison ... and argues convincingly that this neglected novel has an important place in Celine's evolution. Ms. Hudson does as well as one could reasonably expect... She gets the important things right and she understands that Celine is playing a language game rather than telling a story. Perhaps she should try her hand at Feerie II."-Patrick McCarthy, Times Literary Supplement -- Patrick McCarthy Times Literary Supplement

Mary Hudson has a Ph.D. in French and works as a translator and language teacher in New York.