London Bridge
Published on 22. November 2012
Book
Paperback/Softback
480 pages
978-1-84749-244-9 (ISBN)
Description
A major work by one of France's most important authors of the twentieth century, London Bridge is a riotous novel about the London underworld during the First World War.
Picking up where its predecessor Guignol's Band left off, Celine's narrator recounts his disastrous partnership with an eccentric 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 scandalous of all, his affair with a colonel's daughter.
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.
Picking up where its predecessor Guignol's Band left off, Celine's narrator recounts his disastrous partnership with an eccentric 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 scandalous of all, his affair with a colonel's daughter.
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.
Reviews / Votes
Writing as alive as speech. -- Simone de Beauvoir If the French demand bad behaviour from their novelists, they got more than they bargained for with the antisemitic Celine. But they were also getting the prose stylist of the century. -- Tibor Fischer * The Guardian * The most blackly humorous and disenchanted voice in all of French literature... * London Review of Books *More details
Language
English
Place of publication
Richmond
United Kingdom
Publishing group
Alma Books Ltd
Dimensions
Height: 188 mm
Width: 116 mm
Thickness: 22 mm
Weight
538 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-84749-244-9 (9781847492449)
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Schweitzer Classification
Persons
LOUIS-FERDINAND CELINE (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.