Louis-Ferdinand Celine

"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 Celine'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 - Celine 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."--BOOK JACKET.

One of the last major untranslated works by France's most controversial author, London Bridge is a riotous novel about the London underworld during World War I. Picking up where Guignol's Band (1944; English translation 1954) left off, Celine's autobiographical narrator recounts his disastrous partnership with a mystical 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 scandalously, his affair with a baronet's 14-year-old daughter, an English angel whose descent into vice is suspiciously smooth. He dreams of escaping with her to America to start a new life, but he, his mystical partner, and his underaged mistress finally awake to reality crossing windswept London Bridge. Written in his trademark style - a headlong rush of slang, brusque observation, and quirky lyricism, delivered in machine-gun bursts of prose and ellipses - Celine re-creates the dark days during the Great War with sordid verisimilitude and desperate hilarity, expertly captured in Dominic Di Bernardi's racy translation.

Completed the day before his death in 1961, Rigadoon, the most compassionate of Celine's novels, explores the ravages of war and its aftermath. Often comic and always angry, the first-person autobiographical narrator, with his wife and their cat in tow, takes the reader with him on his flight from Paris to Denmark after finding himself on the losing side of World War II. The train rides that encompass the novel are filled with madness and mercy, as Celine, a physician, aids refugees while ignoring his own medical needs.

Excellent

French correspondence -- 20th century -- Critical edition.

Published as Mort à crédit (Gallimard, 1936). This is a UK edition of of Ralph Manheim's English translation originally published as Death on the Installment Plan (New York, 1966)

Death on the Installment Plan is a companion volume to Louis-Ferinand Céline's earlier novel Journey to the End of Night. Published in rapid succession in the middle 1930s, these two books shocked European literatue and world consciousness. Nominally fiction but more rightly called "creative confessions," they told of the author's childhood in excoriating Paris slums, of serves in the mud wastes of World War I and African jungles. Mixing unmitigated despair with Gargantuan comedy, they also created a new style, in which invective and obscenity were laced with phrases of unforgettable poetry.