An unpublished novel by Céline, London, will be published on October 13

(Paris) An unpublished novel by Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Londontaken from manuscripts found after decades in which they had disappeared, is due to appear on October 13, the publisher Gallimard said on Thursday.

This publisher had published in May the unpublished Warnovel centered on the convalescence of a soldier seriously wounded at the front in 1915 and traumatized.

London is taken from manuscripts abandoned by Céline, a collaborationist, when he left Paris hastily in June 1944 for Germany.

After an itinerary that is not known, these manuscripts were given to a journalist, Jean-Pierre Thibaudat. After having kept them in secret for a long time, he had to return them to Celine’s heirs in June 2021.

War ended with the departure of the protagonist, Brigadier Ferdinand, for England. Londonwritten in 1934, “is the direct result”, explained Gallimard in its publication program.

“It stands out as the great story of a dual vocation: that of writing and that of medicine. Or how to stand as close as possible to the truth of men, in the midst of this outrageous and deceitful farce that is life, ”added the editor.

Also seriously wounded during the First World War, Céline left for the British capital in 1915, assigned to the French consulate. There is only one year left.

This period is mentioned in Guignol’s Banda novel published in 1944, and London Bridge (Guignol’s Band II), published in 1964, three years after the author’s death.

These novels have in common to depict the world of prostitution. In LondonFerdinand takes up residence in an attic of Leicester Pension, where Cantaloup, a mackerel from Montpellier, organizes intense sex trafficking with the complicity of a policeman,” says Gallimard.

With some 140,000 copies sold to date, War was a success in bookstores, accompanied by a favorable review on this striking evocation of the human damage of the Great War.

Should follow a revised version of pipe breakeran unfinished novel published in 1949 on life in the barracks before the First World War, and The Legend of King Krogolda medieval tale that the publisher Denoël had refused.