“London”, second novel, after “war”, from the unpublished manuscripts of Céline made public in 2021, has just been published. Giulia Mela and Pierluigi Pellini, specialists from the writer, expose to the “world” the results of their first critical reading of this book.
Interview by
On July 22, two Italian academics published on the site of the Institute of Modern Texts and Manuscripts (Item, CNRS/Ecole Normale Supérieure) ” Genesis D ‘A bestseller. Some hypotheses on an alleged “unpublished novel” by Louis-Ferdinand Céline “, a excavated study of war (Gallimard), the first of the manuscripts of Louis-Ferdinand Céline (1894-1961) found in 2021 to be the subject of a publication. They believed that this text was the “draft an episode” of travel at the end of the night (Denoël, 1932) and that, from then on, it did not deserve to be published as a novel in its own right.
Pierluigi Pellini, professor at the University of Siena, specialist in the French novel of the XIX e and XX e centuries and author of the Guerra al Buio. Céline e la Tradizione del Romanzo Bellico (“War in the dark. Céline and the tradition of the war novel”, Quodlibet, 2020, not translated), and Giulia Mela, doctoral student at the University of Siena and at the Sorbonne-Nouvelle , who works on Zola and Céline, agreed to read, for “Le Monde of books”, London, the second published manuscript, which has just been published. Diagnosis.
“London” seems to you to deserve the same reproaches as those you have formulated about “war”?
Pierluigi Pellini: London is a text that is both less problematic and less interesting than war. In war there are passages on the family, the relationship to tradition, the representation of war, heroism, which are very enlightening and sometimes magnificent. In London, there are undoubtedly also successful pages, but diluted, in a way, in a very anecdotal context. We are very far from the density of the best Céline.
Giulia Mela: On the other hand, London is an almost complete manuscript, a first draft, comprising many problems, but having a fairly solid unit, where war was published as an autonomous novel while It is clearly a fragment. Already, the War title is not Céline’s hand, unlike London, which is on the shirts in which the manuscript has been preserved. In addition, we find in the war manuscript, of which a facsimile was published [Editions des Saints-Pères, 264 pages, 160 euros], a first sentence that was not transcribed in the Gallimard edition: ” Not quite “, a sign that the text we know continuously another, still unknown.
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