War
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Céline had long claimed that Death on the Installment Plan was part of a trilogy, and that the manuscripts of War and London had been stolen by the Resistance from his apartment, when he fled for his life--an abhorred collaborator--from Paris. Few believed him, but then, mysteriously, the manuscripts came to light in 2020. Greeted rapturously in France ("a miracle," Le Monde; "the discovery of a great text," Le Point), War is sure to be more controversy abroad. Though much revered as "the most blackly humorous and disenchanted voice in all of French literature" (London Review of Books), Céline is also reviled for his infamous antisemitic wartime pamphlets. War begins with Ferdinand waking in shock on the battlefield, grievously injured, with all his comrades sprawled out dead around him: it's a scene of visceral horror, carnage, and pain. The novel's key idea--that trench warfare lodges itself in the soldier's head forever, goes on destroying him, cuts him off from those who have not been on the front, and makes the hypocrisies of their safe world repugnant--drives itself under the reader's skin, powered by the sheer velocity of Céline's voracious, gritty, raw, graphic style.
About this Author
Louis-Ferdinand Céline (1894-1961) was a French writer and doctor whose novels are antiheroic visions of human suffering. Accused of collaboration with the Nazis, Céline fled France in 1944 first to Germany and then to Denmark. Condemned by default (1950) in France to one year of imprisonment and declared a national disgrace, Céline returned to France after his pardon in 1951, where he continued to write until his death. His classic books include Journey to the End of the Night, Death on the Installment Plan, London Bridge, North, Rigadoon, Conversations with Professor Y, Castle to Castle, and Normance . A Chevalier des Arts et Lettres, Mandell has translated works by a number of important French authors, including Proust, Flaubert, Genet, Maupassant, and Blanchot.
Reviews
"A more intense realization of the horrors of the Great War has never been written. The novel emerges, inevitably, to much reverberating argument over the good and evil of Céline's oeuvre and its meanings, about whether his literary value can be separated from the vile anti-Semitism of his political pamphleteering, and how we should respond to the whole. [But] the line between Céline's pamphlets and Auschwitz is direct; to pretend that it's not is to sin against history. But no one can easily forget, in this new book as in the older ones, the intensity of Céline's realization of the inexpungible human emotions of hatred and horror. When it comes to Céline, then or now, an ability to admire, a refusal to censor, and a readiness to condemn, should be--must be--part of a single compound response. Evil genius demands no less."
"The shattered imagery, the dizzying jump-cuts between scenes and the heaving, roiling rhythm of the sentences create an overwhelming sensation of nausea. But unlike the metaphysical vertigo of Jean-Paul Sartre's 'Nausea' (1938), the sickness here is viscerally present."
"Guerre is breathtaking. Its immediacy, its ostinato of physical pain, its lewd and desperate milieu of wounded soldiers in a field hospital behind the front lines, will either repel or draw you with its sardonic wit and glints of tenderness and trapdoor twists of narrative."
"War has its own sinister charm, and it provides a further hallucinated contribution to Céline's case against war... In Search of Unlost Terror might be a title for the book."
"Inimitably rowdy: the missing link between the Marquis and Henry Miller. 'He drank coffee as if he were drinking gold.' You read that, and you could die happy."
"Céline's furious style is in full force, and is well served by the brevity of the text. Devoted fans will rejoice."
"War will be of lasting interest to both Céline completists and those who question whether art can, or should, be separated from the regrettable views and deeds of its creators. No one can doubt his talent and status as one of the 20th century's great stylists."
"A rare instance in which the novel lives up to the hype surrounding its rediscovery. Mandell deftly captures Céline's tone and rhythm while preserving the eccentricities that made him such a singular stylist. You get the sense that what you're reading isn't a simple transposition of words from one language into another, but precisely what Céline intended... a cautionary, timely and unflinching portrait of a civilization that still considers war an exciting spectator sport pitting Good against Evil."
"A hallucinatory romp through the early days of the First World War."
"War was to have been the second volume of a trilogy of novels provisionally entitled Childhood-War-London. It is an extraordinary work, hysterical in tone and demented in content. It is deeply disturbing and horribly compelling."
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