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London BridgeAuthor: Louis-Ferdinand Céline Translator: Dominic Di Bernardi French Literature Series March 1995 390 pages, 6 x 9 Dimensions: Paperback, 1-56478-175-5 / 1-56478-071-6 Retail Paperback Price: Our Paperback Price: $11.60—20% OFF! 
Retail Hardcover Price: Our Hardcover Price: $19.16—20% OFF!
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Book Description
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.
About the Author
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Louis-Ferdinand Céline (1894-1961) changed French fiction permanently when he first exploded onto the literary scene in 1932 with Journey to the End of the Night and again in 1936 with Death on the Installment Plan. His vast and liberating influence on American writers can be seen in the works of Jack Kerouac, William Borroughs, Philip Roth, and Kurt Vonnegut, among others. In 1993, Dalkey Archive published his previously untranslated London Bridge and has since made available his novels North, Rigadoon, and Castle to Castle. |
About the Translator
| In addition to several of Jacques Roubaud’s books, Dominic Di Bernardi has translated works by Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Muriel Cerf, Claude Ollier, and Patrick Grainville, among others. |
Praise
"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 . . . A raw, searing assault on the sensibilities, infused with anguished concern for human foolishness and folly. The translation is an especially faithful rendition of Céline's unique style."—Kirkus Reviews"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 Céline's most thrilling novel and his best journey—a hallucinatory trip—to the ends (East and West) of an unreal or rather surrealistic city very much like hell. London Bridge is not falling down and will not fall from your hands."—Julian Rios
"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."—Library Journal
"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, Céline: A Biography
"[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 the directest possible lie to those critics who thought him played out after Death on the Installment Plan as well as those who only see in him nihilism and despair."—Merlin Thomas, Louis-Ferdinand Céline
More Information
Also by Louis-Ferdinand Céline:Castle to Castle
Conversations with Professor Y
North
Rigadoon
Our Share of Time
Disconnection
The Mise-en-Scène
The Cave of Heaven
The Great Fire of London: A Story With Interpolations and Bifurcations
Hortense in Exile
Hortense is Abducted
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Ape
Mordechai Schamz