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London Bridge

Preface by Dominic Di Bernardi
Translated by Dominic Di Bernardi

Hardcover - $23.95 $19.16 Save $4.79 (20%)
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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.

Reviews

Press 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 . .
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Library Journal
Translator Di Bernardi has achieved a tour de force by providing an English equivalent of the underground's unsavory grammar and by re-creating Céline's metro emotif (the latter's own terms): dislocated phrases separated by ellipses, effecting a constant firing of verbal energy.



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

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Genres : Fiction : Europe : Western Europe
Countries : France


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