London Bridge
Preface by Dominic Di Bernardi
Translated by Dominic Di Bernardi
In this widely acclaimed translation, Dominic DiBernardi expertly captures Céline's trademark style of prose which has served as inspiration to such American writers as Philip Roth, Kurt Vonnegut, William Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, Charles Bukowski, Norman Mailer and Joseph Heller.
One of the last major untranslated works by France's most controversial author, London Bridge is a riotous novel about the London underworld during World War I. Picking up where Guignol's Band (1944; English translation 1954) left off, Céline's autobiographical narrator recounts his disastrous partnership with a mystical 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 scandalously, his affair with a baronet's 14-year-old daughter, an English angel whose descent into vice is suspiciously smooth. He dreams of escaping with her to America to start a new life, but he, his mystical partner, and his underaged mistress finally awake to reality crossing windswept London Bridge.
Written in his trademark style—a headlong rush of slang, brusque observation, and quirky lyricism, delivered in machine-gun bursts of prose and ellipses—Céline re-creates the dark days during the Great War with sordid verisimilitude and desperate hilarity, expertly captured in Dominic Di Bernardi's racy translation.
Details
Format
Hardcover
ISBN-10
1-56478-071-6
ISBN-13
978-1-56478-071-3
Publication Date
Mar 1995
Nb of pages
390
Dimensions 6 x 9 in.
Format
Paperback
ISBN-10
1-56478-175-5
ISBN-13
9781564781758
Publication Date
Mar 1995
Nb of pages
390
Dimensions 6 x 9 in.
ReviewsPress Reviews
Kirkus Reviews
The first English translation of a major novel by the French writer: a characteristically nightmarish whirl through the dark places of the soul and society in prose of equally feverish velocity . .
...more
Library Journal Quotations
For most readers Céline is only the author of his first novel, Journey to the End of the Night. But Céline, like good wines and good novelists, has improved with age. London Bridge is ...more
-Julian Rios
Céline's images occasionally waver on the edge of delicate and whirling lyricism, of inconsolable sorrows . . . [London Bridge is] one of his most beautiful books.
-Frederic Vitoux
[London Bridge] is without question the warmest and most benign of all Céline's works, amusing, grotesque in places, tender for the most part, full of the enthusiasm of youth . . . It gives ...more
-Merlin Thomas WE ALSO SUGGEST
The Invitation
This 1987 novel by Nobel Prize-winner Claude Simon is a sardonic look at glasnost Russia, where recent reforms and improvements carry all the conviction of rouge on a corpse. The narrator is one of fifteen international guests who have been invited on...
other titles related to Genres : Fiction : Europe : Western Europe Countries : France |
||||||||||||||||

