Guignol's Band: Louis-Ferdinand Céline. - Softcover

Céline, Louis-Ferdinand

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1847491995 ISBN 13: 9781847491992

Publisher: Alma Classics, 2017

Synopsis

Céline’s third novel, first published in 1944 but dealing with events taking place during the First World War, Guignol’s Band follows the narrator’s meanderings through London after he has been demobilized due to a war injury. The result is a frank, uncompromising, yet grotesquely funny portrayal of the English capital’s seedy underworld, peopled by prostitutes, pimps and schemers. Often considered to be Céline’s funniest work, Guignol’s Band showcases its author’s idiosyncratic style at its finest, frantically blending slang, invective, onomatopoeia with literary language, and bridging the gap between gritty realism and absurd mysticism.

About this title

Review:

The most blackly humorous and disenchanted voice in all of French literature. * London Review of Books * If the French demand bad behaviour from their novelists, they got more than they bargained for with the antisemitic Celine. But they were also getting the prose stylist of the century. --The Guardian

About the Author:

Louis-Ferdinand Céline was one of the most controversial authors of the twentieth century, a writer who mixed realism with imaginative fantasy, and like his contemporary Henry Miller, an iconoclast who shocked and frightened many of his readers. Céline, the pen name of L.F. Destouches, was a doctor in poor Parisian districts whose experience of the misery and chicanery of the poor gave him a jaundiced view of humanity that he poured into prose that is comic as well as often frightening and obscene.

About this edition

• Publisher: Alma Classics
• Publication date: 2017
• ISBN 10: 1847491995
• ISBN 13: 9781847491992
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 256