Louis-Ferdinand Céline – författare

Only UK edition in printFirst published in 1932, Journey to the End of the Night was immediately acclaimed as a masterpiece and a turning point in French literature. Told in the first person by Céline’s fictional alter ego Bardamu, the novel is loosely based on the author’s own experiences during the First World War, in French colonial Africa, in the USA and, later, as a young doctor in a working-class suburb in Paris. Céline’s disgust with human folly, malice, greed and the chaotic state in which man has left society lies behind the bitterness that distinguishes his idiosyncratic, colloquial and visionary writing and gives it its force.

Often considered to be Celine's funniest work, Guignol's Band showcases its author's idiosyncratic style at its finest, frantically blending slang, invective, onomatopoeia with literary language, and bridging the gap between gritty realism and absurd mysticism.

Only UK edition in printA major work by one of France’s most important authors of the twentieth century, London Bridge is a riotous novel about the London underworld during the First World War.Picking up where its predecessor Guignol’s Band left off, Céline’s narrator recounts his disastrous partnership with an eccentric Frenchman intent on financing a trip to Tibet by winning a gas-mask competition; his uneasy relationship with London’s pimps and whores and their common nemesis, Inspector Matthew of Scotland Yard; and, most scandalous of all, his affair with a colonel’s daughter.Written in Céline’s trademark style – a headlong rush of slang, brusque observation and quirky lyricism, delivered in machine-gun bursts of prose and ellipses – London Bridge recreates the dark days during the Great War with sordid verisimilitude and desperate hilarity.

Fable for Another Time is one of the most significant and far-reaching literary texts of postwar France. Composed in the tumultuous aftermath of World War II, largely in the Danish prison cell where the author was awaiting extradition to France on charges of high treason, the book offers a unique perspective on the war, the postwar political purges in France, and Louis-Ferdinand Céline's own dissident politics.  The tale of a man imprisoned and reviled by his own countrymen, the Fable follows its character's decline from virulent hatred to near madness as a result of his violent frustration with the hypocrisy and banality of his fellow human beings. In part because of the story's clear link to his own case—and because of the legal and political difficulties this presented—Céline was compelled to push his famously elliptical, brilliantly vitriolic language to new and extraordinary extremes in Fable for Another Time. The resulting linguistic and stylistic innovation make this work stand out as one of the most original and revealing literary undertakings of its time. Louis-Ferdinand Céline (1894–1961) was a French writer and physician best known for the novels Journey to the End of the Night (1932) and Death on the Installment Plan (1936). Céline was accused of collaboration during World War II and fled France in 1944 to live first in Germany, then in Denmark, where he was imprisoned for over a year; an amnesty in 1951 allowed him to return to France. Céline remains anathema to a large segment of French society for his antisemitic writings; at the same time his novels are enormously admired by each new generation.

London centers on Ferdinand, the protagonist of Céline’s London who is a gravely injured WWI soldier with a severe wound to his ear and  suffers from both vertigo and the endless noise he can’t stop hearing: I caught the war in my head. It’s locked up inside my head. Ferdinand has earned a reprieve as well as a medal, and he has left France to join his prostitute friend Angèle in London. Despite his decoration, he nevertheless fears being sent back to the front and, in semi-hiding, takes up residence in an attic room where his pal Cantaloup runs an intense sex- trafficking operation. Colorful characters populate London: besides Cantaloup and Angèle, there is the generous poor Jewish doctor Yugenbitz, the corrupt cop Bijou, an eccentric English aristocrat, a slew of pimps, a rich variety of whores, and the revolutionary former bomb-maker Borokrom.London is also a sweeping, grand-narrative-as-funhouse-mirror of Céline’s own dual profession of medicine and writing: It’s true I was sick and in a lot of pain and so I was justified. The consolation of having found Yugenbitz and the path, and the way that he’d given me hope to understand his beautiful work, that had sort of intoxicated me, I admit. I’m a little too enthusiastic about things of the mind. I’d have liked I think to cure all human diseases, so they’d never suffer again, the bastards. We’re a strange lot, if we only admit it. Fine.

With an undercurrent of sensual excitement, C?line paints an almost unbearably vivid picture of society and the human condition.

In this widely acclaimed translation, Dominic DiBernardi expertly captures C?line's trademark style of prose which has served as inspiration to such American writers as Philip Roth, Kurt Vonnegut, William Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, Charles Bukowski, Norman Mailer and Joseph Heller.

"Here's the truth, simply stated . . . bookstores are suffering from a serious crisis of falling sales."

Only UK edition in printWhen Céline’s first novel, Journey to the End of the Night was first published in 1932, it created an instant scandal, being extravagantly praised by its supporters and savagely attacked by its horrified opponents. Four years later came the sequel, Death on Credit. Both were a new kind of novel, frank about the author’s thoughts and actions in ways that readers had never encountered, ultra-realistic – and full of incidents that could not possibly be true to life – and characters that stretched the imagination.In Death on Credit, Ferdinand Bardamu, Céline’s alter ego, is a doctor in Paris, treating the poor who seldom pay him but who take every advantage of his availability. The action is not continuous but goes back in time to earlier memories and often moves into fantasy, especially in Bardamu’s sexual escapades; the style becomes deliberately rougher and sentences disintegrate to catch the flavour of the teeming world of everyday Parisian tragedies, the struggle to make a living, illness, venereal disease, the sordid stories of families whose destiny is governed by their own stupidity, malice, lust and greed. This fascinating book by one of the greatest twentieth-century novelists is an unforgettable experience for the reader.

Only edition in printThe scene opens in a smouldering orchard in Flanders, where the French soldier Ferdinand, shell-shocked, badly wounded and surrounded on all sides by mud, corpses and destruction, tries to find his way to safety and make sense of what has happened to him since he lost consciousness. His hallucinatory wanderings eventually take him to the military hospital of Peurdu-sur-la-Lys. There, after narrowly cheating death, he strikes up a friendship with a Parisian pimp and continues to be confronted with the moral chaos and side effects of war in all their vicious and repulsive senselessness and brutality.Written around 1934, only a couple of years after Journey to the End of the Night, War shares its protagonist, its setting and many of its themes with Céline’s most celebrated novel. Its manuscript, considered lost after being looted during the Liberation of Paris, re-emerged in France in 2020, sparking a frenzy of interest and being hailed as a major rediscovery. Translated now for the first time into English, War is a powerfully vivid, unflinching, darkly comical exploration of the physical and mental trauma of the Western Front, which provides a fascinating missing link in the writing career of one of the greatest – and most controversial – authors of the twentieth century.

Only UK edition in printCéline’s recently rediscovered novel, London, centres on Ferdinand, the protagonist of War, a shell-shocked French soldier with a severe wound to his ear suffering from vertigo and chronic tinnitus. Having earned a reprieve as well as a medal, Ferdinand has left France to join his prostitute friend Angèle in London. Despite his decoration, he fears being sent back to the front and holes up in an attic room from where his pal, the pimp Cantaloup, runs a flourishing sex-trafficking operation. Populated by unforgettable characters such as the generous Jewish doctor Yugenbitz, the corrupt cop Bijou, an eccentric English aristocrat, a slew of pimps, a rich variety of whores and the revolutionary Borokrom, a former bomb maker, London is a sweeping narrative that deserved to be numbered among Céline’s greatest works, and which is informed, like his masterpiece Journey to the End of the Night, by his own experiences in the British capital and as a young doctor in a working-class suburb of Paris.