An unpublished novel by Louis-Ferdinand Céline,
London
, drawn from the manuscripts found after decades, is due out on October 13, said the publisher Gallimard.
While their precise itinerary is still not known, these manuscripts were finally given to a journalist, Jean-Pierre Thibaudat, who kept them for a long time in secret.
He had to return them to Céline's heirs in June 2021. Gallimard had published the unpublished
War
in May , a novel centered on the convalescence of a soldier seriously injured at the front in 1915 and traumatized.
London,
meanwhile, is taken from manuscripts abandoned by Céline, a collaborationist, when he left Paris in June 1944 for Germany.
Read alsoCéline, unpublished: “I caught the war in my head”
War
ended with the departure of the protagonist, Brigadier Ferdinand, for England.
London
, written in 1934,
"is the direct sequel",
explained Gallimard in its publication programme.
“It stands out as the great story of a double 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 Band
, a novel published in 1944,
Guignol's Band II
), published in 1964, three years after the author's death.
Read alsoCéline: why Gallimard gives up republishing its anti-Semitic pamphlets
These novels have in common to depict the world of prostitution.
In
London
,
"Ferdinand takes up residence in an attic of Leicester Pension, where Cantaloupe, a pimp from Montpellier, organizes intense sex trafficking with the complicity of a policeman",
indicates Gallimard.
With some 140,000 copies sold to date,
War
has been a success in bookstores, with favorable reviews for this striking evocation of the human damage of the Great War.
They were to follow a revised version of
Casse-pipe
, an unfinished novel published in 1949 on life in the barracks before the First World War, and
La Légende du roi Krogold
, a medieval tale that the publisher Denoël had refused.