War

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.

I feel called by his voice... In France, my Proust is Celine

Anyone can do the nastiness of life; it’s the rendering of the look and feel of the tumultuous that takes genius

He discovered a higher and more awful order of literary truth by ignoring the crippled vocabularies of ladies and gentlemen and by using, instead, the more comprehensive language of shrewd and tormented guttersnipes

The first of the unpublished novels rediscovered in 2021, War is a short, vivid, tragic and salacious text to be ranked alongside the author’s best work […] It constitutes a central piece of the immense literary puzzle that Céline obsessively crafted out of his own life. An event

War is a novel about survival as well as a cry of rage against war, against the Great Slaughter, which morally and physically traumatised the writer Céline

Céline makes words perform a drunken dance, flouting grammatical rules and conjugations, but never compromising on rhythm or narrative economy

LOUIS-FERDINAND CÉLINE (1894–1961) was one of the most controversial authors of the twentieth century, a writer who mixed realism with imaginative fantasy, and, like his contemporary Henry Miller, an iconoclast who shocked many of his readers. His experiences as a soldier during the First World War and as a physician treating the poor in the suburbs of Paris gave him a jaundiced view of humanity, which he poured into a unique style of prose that is at the same time blackly humorous, daring and unsettling.