After the publication of “War” last May, Gallimard announces the release date of a new text taken from the recently found manuscripts of the author.
An unpublished novel by Louis-Ferdinand Céline, London, drawn from the manuscripts found after decades where they had disappeared, must be published on October 13, indicates Gallimard this Thursday. The publisher had published in May the unpublished Guerrenovel centered on the convalescence of a soldier seriously wounded at the front in 1915 and traumatized.
London is taken from manuscripts abandoned by Céline, a collaborationist, when he left Paris hastily in June 1944 for Germany. Following an itinerary that is not known, these manuscripts were given to a journalist, Jean-Pierre Thibaudat. After having kept them secret for a long time, he had to return them to Celine’s heirs in June 2021.
A “direct sequel”
Guerre ended with the departure of the protagonist, Brigadier Ferdinand, for England. Londonwritten in 1934, “is the direct result”, explained Gallimard in its publication program.
“It imposes itself as the great story of a double vocation: that of writing and that of medicine. Or how to stand as close as possible to the truth of men, in the midst of this outrageous and misleading farce that is life,” the editor added.
Also seriously wounded during the First World War, Céline left for the British capital in 1915, assigned to the French consulate. There is only one year left. This period is mentioned in Guignol’s Banda novel published in 1944, and London Bridge (Guignol’s Band IIpublished in 1964, three years after the death of the author.
These novels have in common to depict the world of prostitution. In London“Ferdinand takes up residence in an attic of Leicester Pension, where Cantaloup, a mackerel from Montpellier, organizes intense sex trafficking with the complicity of a policeman”, indicates Gallimard.
Other publications planned
With some 140,000 copies sold to date, Guerre was a hit in bookstores, with favorable reviews for this striking evocation of the human devastation of the Great War.
Should follow a revised version of cassette pipean unfinished novel published in 1949 on life in the barracks before the First World War, and The Legend of King Krogolda medieval tale that the publisher Denoël had refused.