Details

ISBN-10: 0811200183
ISBN-13: 9780811200189
Publisher: New Directions Publishing Corporation
Publish Date: 01/17/1969
Dimensions: 8.01" L, 5.24" W, 0.65" H

Guignol’s Band: Novel

Translator: Bernard Frechtman

Paperback

Price: $17.95

Overview

The hero, the semi-autobiographical Ferdinand, moves through the nightmare of London’s underworld during the years of World War I. In this distressing setting, he meets pimps and prostitutes, pawnbrokers and magicians, policemen and arsonists. He sees social and physiological decomposition as these processes unfold along parallel lines of development. The illusions of existence are nakedly exposed. The narrative erupts in Céline’s characteristic elliptical style. His splintered sentences and scatology reflect his fury at the fragmentation of experience and at his own impotence in the face of it. Out of his rage, he forces the meaninglessness back on itself, and the exuberance of his struggle triumphs in the comic exaggeration of satire. Ultimately, his subject is not death but life, and he responds to it by a strengthened commitment to the sensual and concrete. His hallucinatory world is so vividly realized that it does, indeed, challenge the reality of the reader’s more conventional world.

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Reviews
It could be said that without Céline there would have been no Henry Miller, no Jack Kerouac, no Charles Bukowski, no Beat poets.–John Banville
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Details

ISBN-10: 0811200183
ISBN-13: 9780811200189
Publisher: New Directions Publishing Corporation
Publish Date: 01/17/1969
Dimensions: 8.01" L, 5.24" W, 0.65" H
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