The manuscripts of Louis-Ferdinand Céline found in 2021 will give rise in May to the publication of an unpublished work,
Guerre
, and to an exhibition, announced Tuesday the Gallimard editions.
To discover
Discover the “Best of the Goncourt Prize” collection
The novel
Guerre
will appear on May 5 in the classic Blanche 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 work
"a bundle of two hundred and fifty pages revealing a novel whose action takes place in Flanders during the Great War"
and a
"first draft manuscript, written some two years after the publication of
Journey to the end of the night
”
, 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 editor.
Read alsoExceptional discovery of unpublished manuscripts by Céline
The future writer, aged 20 when the First World War broke out, remained marked all his life by the horrors of the fighting from which he emerged seriously injured in 1914. He denounced in
War
an
“international slaughterhouse in madness”
, notes Gallimard.
This novel was part of writings that Céline himself believed lost forever, after having left them in his Parisian apartment which the author, collaborationist and anti-Semite, had left for Germany shortly before the Liberation.
Read alsoInédits de Céline: the writer's heirs ready for a long legal battle
Céline's publishing house is also planning an exhibition entitled
Céline, the found manuscripts
, at the Galerie Gallimard in Paris, from May 6 to July 16, with the academic Alban Cerisier as curator.
Two other unpublished works will follow in the fall,
London
, the story of his departure for the British capital in 1915, which should be much longer than
War
, and a medieval tale,
The Will of King Krogold
.
Finally, in 2023, Gallimard intends to publish new editions of the novel
Casse-pipe
, unfinished in its previously known edition, and of volume III of Céline's novels in the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade.
/cloudfront-eu-central-1.images.arcpublishing.com/prisa/AW2KNQ2UOZA4PHPLO4DEKRFIOQ.jpg)
/cloudfront-eu-central-1.images.arcpublishing.com/prisa/Z3C74GDWPZH2JMJB4EIL7Q7S4I.jpg)
/cloudfront-eu-central-1.images.arcpublishing.com/prisa/2C5HI6YHNFHDLJSBNWHOIAS2AE.jpeg)
