Other critics say the early Celine was just hiding his true feelings. “These manuscripts come at the right time - they are a divine surprise - for Celine to become a writer again: the one who matters, from 1932 to 1936,“ literary historian Philippe Roussin told AFP. Many in the French literary scene seem keen to separate early and late Celine. After the war, he launched a campaign of Holocaust-denial and sought to muddy the waters around his own war-time exploits - allowing him to worm his way back into France without facing any repercussions. “Journey to the End of the Night” was actually a hit among progressives for its anti-war message, as well as a raw, slang-filled style that stuck two fingers up at bourgeois sensibilities.Ĭeline’s attitude to the Jews only revealed itself in 1937 with the publication of a pamphlet, “Trifles for a Massacre”, which set him on a new path of racial hatred and conspiracy-mongering. If French reviewers seem strangely reluctant to focus on Celine’s anti-Semitism, it is partly because his early writings (”Guerre” is thought to date from 1934) show little sign of it.
His time across the Channel is the subject of another newly discovered novel, “Londres” (London), to be published this autumn.
It opens with 20-year-old Brigadier Ferdinand finding himself miraculously alive after waking up on a Belgian battlefield, follows his treatment and hasty departure for England - all based on Celine’s real experiences. Like much of Celine’s work, it is deeply autobiographical, recounting his terrible experiences during World War I. Gallimard has yet to say whether there will be a translation.
“The end of a mystery, the discovery of a great text,“ writes Le Point a “miracle,“ says Le Monde “breathtaking,“ gushes Le Journal du Dimanche. In June 1944, with the Allies advancing on Paris, the writer was forced to abandon a pile of his manuscripts in his Montmartre apartment.Ĭeline expected rough treatment, having spent the war carousing with the Gestapo, fingering Jews and foreigners to the authorities and publishing racist pamphlets about Jewish world conspiracies.įor decades, no one knew what happened to his papers, and he angrily accused resistance fighters of burning them.īut at some point in the 2000s, they ended up with retired journalist Jean-Pierre Thibaudat, who passed them - completely out of the blue - to Celine’s heirs last summer.ĭespite this unsettling history, the reviews of the resulting 150-page novel, published by Gallimard, have been unanimous in their praise. PARIS: It is a rare thing when the story of a book’s publication is even more mysterious than the plot of the novel itself.īut that might be said of “Guerre” (War) by one of France’s most celebrated and controversial literary figures, Louis-Ferdinand Celine, which arrives in bookstores on Thursday, some 78 years after its manuscript disappeared.Ĭeline’s reputation has somehow survived the fact that he was one of France’s most eager collaborators with the Nazis.Īlready a superstar thanks to his debut novel “Journey to the End of the Night” (1932), Celine became one of the most ardent anti-Semitic propagandists even before France’s occupation.
0 kommentar(er)
