(Paris) An unpublished novel by Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Warwill be published on May 5 by Gallimard editions when the author himself believed that this story of the First World War had been lost forever.
Posted at 12:34 p.m.
War comes from the famous manuscripts of Céline found and revealed to the general public in August 2021.
The novel will integrate the classic White collection, in an edition established by the historian Pascal Fouché and with a foreword by the lawyer François Gibault, executor of the writer and specialist in his work.
Gallimard mentions in his presentation of the book “a bundle of two hundred and fifty pages revealing a novel whose action takes place in Flanders during the Great War”. They contain a “draft manuscript, written some two years after the publication of journey to the Edge of the Night », i.e. in 1934.
“Céline, between autobiographical story and work of imagination, lifts the veil on the central experience of her existence: the physical and moral trauma of the front”, adds the publisher.
The future writer, aged 20 when the First World War broke out, remained marked all his life by the horrors of the fighting in the region of Ypres (Belgium) in 1914. He denounces in War an “international slaughterhouse in madness”, notes Gallimard.
“I have always slept like this in the excruciating noise since December 14. I caught the war in my head. It’s locked in my head,” says another excerpt leaked by the prestigious publishing house.
The story opens with the moment when “Brigadier Ferdinand” regains consciousness on a battlefield where he has been seriously wounded. He follows his convalescence in a hospital where he befriends a nurse and a pimp, Bébert. His fear, like that of all the wounded: having to return to battle. He will escape it by being declared unfit and sent to London.
Other unreleased
The novelist, collaborationist and anti-Semite, had left this novel among an immense mass of papers when he left Paris for Germany in June 1944.
He then learned that his apartment had been visited and reported a theft. But when he died in 1961 he did not know the culprits. Their identity remains a mystery even today.
In 2020, a year after the death of Lucette Destouches, the widow of Céline, the journalist Jean-Pierre Thibaudat announced himself to the beneficiaries: he had held these manuscripts for fifteen years.
These beneficiaries, François Gibault and another close to “Mme Céline”, Véronique Robert-Chovin, did not wish to negotiate with him. They recovered all of it, as the newspaper Le Monde was going to reveal in the summer of 2021.
Céline’s publishing house is planning an exhibition entitled “Céline, the manuscripts found”, at the Galerie Gallimard in Paris, from May 6 to July 16, of which the academic Alban Cerisier will be curator.
Will follow in the fall two other unpublished, Londonan account of his departure for the British capital in 1915, which should be much longer than Warand a medieval tale, The Will of King Krogold.
Finally, in 2023, Gallimard intends to publish new editions of the novel pipe breakerunfinished in its hitherto known edition, and volume III of Céline’s novels in the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade.
In 2021, the CEO of the publishing house Antoine Gallimard said he wanted to establish all these editions “in a very scrupulous way”, while Céline, despite the immense success that had earned her journey to the Edge of the Nighthad been reluctant to publish all these works.