Böcker av Louis-Ferdinand Céline

First published in 1932, Journey to the End of the Night was immediately acclaimed as a masterpiece and a turning point in French literature. This edition contains a foreword by John Banville.

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.

Edition originale non censurée. L'auteur se promène le long du halage entre la Jatte et Courbevoie . Une sirène bouseuse l'interpelle. Ils se disputent. La sirène replonge dans l'eau, une fange pleine de bulles. Sans transition, l'auteur nous entretient de ses soucis présents. Il a reçu une lettre à Céline le dégueulasse où un lecteur de son précédent pamphlet (Bagatelles...), qui signe Salvador, Juif, lui annonce crûment la manière dont il a apprécié l'ouvrage. S'ensuit, pendant tout le reste de l'ouvrage, une diatribe où l'auteur explique avec de nombreux détails que le monde entier est enjuivé et que de là viennent toutes les guerres passées et à venir, tous les maux actuels de l'époque. La solution, pour Céline, repose sur un rapprochement entre une France débarrassée de la démocratie parlementaire, de ses Juifs et Francs-maçons, et l'Allemagne nazie.

Edition originale non censurée. Les Beaux Draps est édité sous l'Occupation le 28 février 1941 aux Nouvelles Éditions françaises. Le titre est une référence à l'expression populaire être dans de beaux draps . Louis-Ferdinand Céline exprime une nouvelle fois son aversion des Juifs et des francs-maçons, son dégoût de la démocratie parlementaire, sa vision très sombre du déclin de la France dans l'entre-deux-guerres, sa xénophobie, mais aussi sa sympathie pour l'occupant allemand. Cependant, l'ouvrage fut interdit en zone occupée le 4 décembre 1941 par le gouvernement de Vichy, qui y essuie de nombreuses critiques. C'est dans ce pamphlet que l'écrivain développe son idée des semaines de travail de trente-cinq heures, qu'il nomme le communisme Labiche (d'Eugène Labiche, auteur de vaudevilles).

In this widely acclaimed translation, Dominic DiBernardi expertly captures Celine'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.

La cosa empezó así. Yo nunca había dicho nada. Nada. Fue Arthur Gánate quien me hizo hablar. Arthur, un compañero, estudiante de medicina como yo. Resulta que nos encontramos en la Place Clichy. Después de comer. Quería hablarme. Lo escuché. «¡No nos quedemos fuera! -me dijo-. ¡Vamos adentro!» Y fui y entré con él. «¡Esta terraza está como para freír huevos! ¡Ven por aquí!», comenzó. Entonces advertimos también que no había nadie en las calles, por el calor; ni un coche, nada. Cuando hace mucho frío, tampoco; no ves a nadie en las calles; pero, si fue él mismo, ahora que recuerdo, quien me dijo, hablando de eso: «La gente de París parece estar siempre ocupada, pero, en realidad, se pasean de la mañana a la noche; la prueba es que, cuando no hace bueno para pasear, demasiado frío o demasiado calor, desaparecen. Están todos dentro, tomando cafés con leche o cañas de cerveza. ¡Ya ves! ¡El siglo de la velocidad!, dicen. Pero, ¿dónde? ¡Todo cambia, que es una barbaridad!, según cuentan. ¿Cómo así? Nada ha cambiado, la verdad. Siguen admirándose y se acabó. Y tampoco eso es nuevo.¡Algunas palabras, no muchas, han cambiado! Dos o tres aquí y allá, insignificantes...» Conque, muy orgullosos de haber señalado verdades tan oportunas, nos quedamos allí sentados, mirando, arrobados, a las damas del café.Después salió a relucir en la conversación el presidente Poincaré, que, justo aquella mañana, iba a inaugurar una exposición canina, y, después, burla burlando, salió también Le Temps, donde lo habíamos leído. «¡Hombre, Le Temps ¡Ése es un señor periódico! -dijo Arthur Gánate para pincharme-. ¡No tiene igual para defender a la raza francesa!»

La verità, eccola, pura e semplice, l'editoria si trova in una crisi di vendite gravissima. Mica credere a un solo zero di tutte le pretese tirature di 100 000! 40 000!... neanche 400 copie!... incanta-gonzi! Ohimè!... Ohimè!... solo la "stampa rosa"... e ancora ancora!... se la cava abbastanza... e forse i "libri gialli"... i "verdastri"... Fatto sta che non si vende piú niente... grave!... il Cinema, la televisione, gli elettrodomestici, lo scooter, l'auto a 2, 4, 6 cavalli, al libro gli fanno dei danni enormi... tutto "vendita a rate", figuriamoci! e i "week-ends"!... e le belle vacanze bi! trimestrali!... e le crociere Lololulu!... ciao risparmi!... e sotto coi debiti!... non ci resta neanche un dindino!... allora, capirete, comprare un libro!...

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.

Offers a different perspective on the war and the postwar political purges in France. This book tells the tale of a man imprisoned and reviled by his own countrymen, and 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.

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

Written in Celine'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.

When Celine's first novel, Journey to the End of the Night was first published in 1932, it created an instant scandal. 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.

Céline's masterpiece-colloquial, polemic, hyper realistic-boils over with bitter humor and revulsion at society's idiocy and hypocrisy: Journey to the End of the Night is a literary symphony of cruelty and violence that hurtles through the improbable travels of the petit bourgeois (and largely autobiographical) antihero, Bardamu: from the trenches of WWI, to the African jungle, to New York, to the Ford Factory in Detroit, and finally to life in Paris as a failed doctor. Ralph Manheim's pitch-perfect translation captures Céline's savage energy, and a dynamic afterword by William T. Vollmann presents a fresh, furiously alive take on this astonishing novel.

Louis-Ferdinand Céline (1894-1961) is best known for his early novels Journey to the End of the Night (1932)--which Charles Bukowski described as the greatest novel of the past 2,000 years--and Death on the Installment Plan (1936), but this delirious, fanatical "biography" predates them both. The astounding yet true story of the life of Ignacz Semmelweis provided Céline with a narrative whose appalling events and bizarre twists would have lain beyond credibility in a work of pure fiction. Semmelweis, now regarded as the father of antisepsis, was the first to diagnose correctly the cause of the staggering mortality rates in the lying-in hospital at Vienna. However, his colleagues rejected both his reasoning and his methods, thereby causing thousands of unnecessary deaths in maternity wards across Europe. This episode, one of the most infamous in the history of medicine, and its disastrous effects on Semmelweis himself, are the subject of Céline's semi-fictional evocation, one in which his violent descriptive genius is already apparent. The overriding theme of his later writing--a caustic despair verging on disgust for humanity--finds its first expression here, and yet he also reveals a more compassionate aspect to his character. Semmelweis was not published until 1936, after the novels that made Céline famous. "It is not every day we get a thesis such as Céline wrote on Semmelweis!" wrote Henry Miller of this volume.