War - Softcover

Céline, Louis-Ferdinand

Softcover

ISBN 10: 081123732X ISBN 13: 9780811237321

Publisher: New Directions, 2024

Synopsis

In an incredible turn of events, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, as if declaiming from his grave, thunders back to life: that inimitable, scorching, and monstrously powerful voice roars at us a new in this long-lost novel

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 title

About the Authors

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 de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, Charlotte Mandell has translated over fifty books from the French, including works by Flaubert, Proust, and Genet. In 2001 she received a translation prize from the Modern Language Association for her translation of Faux Pas by Maurice Blanchot, in 2018 she won the National Translation Award in Prose for her translation of Compass by Mathias Énard, in 2024 she received the Thornton Wilder Translation Prize from the Academy of Arts and Letters, and in 2026 she received the French American Foundation Translation Prize for her translation of The Deserters by Mathias Énard. She lives in the Hudson Valley with her husband, the poet Robert Kelly.

Edition details

• Publisher: New Directions
• Publication date: 2024
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 081123732X
• ISBN 13: 9780811237321
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 144