Le Pont de Londres: Guignol's Band II

Louis-Ferdinand Céline

Publié par Gallimard, le 09 novembre 2001

498 pages

Résumé

In this widely acclaimed translation, Dominic Di Bernardi expertly captures Celine'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, Celine'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--Celine re-creates the dark days during the Great War with sordid verisimilitude and desperate hilarity, expertly captured in Dominic Di Bernardi's racy translation.

Voyage au bout de la nuit

Voyage Au Bout De La Nuit

Casse-pipe suivi de Carnet du cuirassier Destouches

Mort à crédit

Féerie pour une autre fois

Le style contre les idées : Rabelais, Zola, Sartre et les autres

D'un château l'autre

Devenir Céline ; lettres inédites de Louis Destouches et de quelques autres (1912-1929)

Critiques