Description
“I’ve slept like this since December 14. I caught the war in my head. It’s locked in my head.”
“A capital piece of the writer’s work is revealed.”
First edition of Guerre, one of the only 270 copies printed on large paper.
An attractive copy preserved in publisher’s wrappers, as issued.
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Céline. Guerre.
Gallimard, Paris 2022.
Copy preserved in publisher’s wrappers, as issued.
First edition.
One of the 270 copies numbered and printed on Rivoli vellum, the only large papers printed.
In August 2021, an announcement had put the celinians and lovers of literature, in trance: the famous manuscripts of Céline which had disappeared for so long had just been found.
“I’ve slept like this since December 14. I caught the war in my head. It’s locked in my head.”
In this story, Céline revives Brigadier Ferdinand and the serious wound received on the battlefield, leaving him unconscious. He recounts the convalescence that followed the service and meetings, with a nurse, or a pimp, Bébert, as his deep trauma born from the experience of shells and trenches.
Among the manuscripts of Louis-Ferdinand Céline recently found was a bundle of two hundred and fifty pages revealing a novel whose action was in Flanders during the Great War. With the transcription of this first draft manuscript, written some two years after the publication of Voyage au bout de la nuit (1932), a key piece of the writer’s work is brought to light.
Céline, between an autobiographical narrative and a work of imagination, sheds light on the central experience of his existence: the physical and moral trauma of the war, in the « mad international slaughterhouse ». We follow Brigadier Ferdinand’s convalescence from the moment when, seriously wounded, he regained consciousness on the battlefield until his departure for London. At the hospital of Peurdu-sur-la-lys, the object of all the attentions of a nurse, Ferdinand, having befriended the pimp Bébert, deceives death and frees himself from the destiny which was hitherto promised him. This brutal time of disillusionment and awareness, which the author had never addressed in the form of an autonomous literary narrative, appears here in its most raw light.
An attractive copy, preserved in publisher’s wrappers, as issued
