London Bridge

A major work by one of France’s most important authors of the twentieth century, London Bridge is a riotous novel about the London underworld during World War I. Picking up where its predecessor Guignol’s Band left off, Céline’s semiautobiographical narrator recounts his disastrous partnership with a mystical Frenchman (intent on financing a trip to Tibet by winning a gasmask competition); his uneasy relationship with London’s pimps and whores and their common nemesis, Inspector Matthew of Scotland Yard; and, most scandalous of all, his affair with a baronet’s daughter.

Written in his trademark style – a headlong rush of slang, brusque observation and quirky lyricism, delivered in machine-gun bursts of prose and ellipses – Céline recreates the dark days during the Great War with sordid verisimilitude and desperate hilarity.