Books by Louis-Ferdinand Céline
“The novel is the story of his youth and young adulthood as a child of a struggling lower-middle-class couple who never quite reach economic or social security…Celine’s novel combines immersion in the narrator’s consciousness with a thoroughgoing attack on every aspect of modern life. This negativity is an important dimension of modernist writing. Each modernist discovered their voice, discovered what they loved to write about, by first discovering what they hated. Celine pushes this tendency to its absolute limit. Critics have compared his short sentences, separated by the trademark three dots, to machine gun fire railing against bourgeois hypocrisy, the self-satisfaction and complacency of interwar Europe, the idiocy of public opinion, the vacancy of popular taste, and the grinding of urban poverty.” Read more...
Michael Clune, Literary Scholar
London Bridge
by Louis-Ferdinand Céline
Because Céline is a deeply French writer, in a totally different tradition, he sees London as mythologized, as a fictional entity, and he treats it with a sort of dynamism and an energy that I don’t find in English writing
Interviews where books by Louis-Ferdinand Céline were recommended
The Best London Novels, recommended by Iain Sinclair
A city of hidden depths and morbid fascination, by turns respectable and savage. Iain Sinclair picks five novels that capture the spirit and rich history of London.
The Best Modernist Novels, recommended by Michael Clune
Modernist novels emerged as a reaction against modernity but, in their focus on inner consciousness, captured the experience of living life like never before. American writer and critic Michael Clune picks five of the best modernist novels from 1936 up to 2013. Modernist literature is still with us, he explains, because what it was reacting against is still with us.
