Louis-Ferdinand Céline
Condition: SECONDHAND
This is a secondhand book. The jacket image is a photograph of the exact copy we have in stock. This image shows the condition of this book. Further condition remarks are below.
Condition remarks:
Condition: Good. Jacket: good. Page Condition: Good. Markings: No markings. Binding condition: Firm.
Few figures in twentieth-century French literature provoke as much fascination and controversy as Louis-Ferdinand Céline — the visionary author of Journey to the End of the Night whose genius was inseparable from his infamy. Merlin Thomas's critical biography charts the turbulent life and extraordinary literary output of this most contradictory of writers, from his working-class origins and harrowing experiences in World War I, to his emergence as one of modernism's most radical voices, and his eventual disgrace as a collaborator and anti-Semitic pamphleteer. Thomas brings rigorous scholarly authority to bear on a subject that demands both moral seriousness and literary sensitivity, tracing how Céline's hallucinatory prose style — defined by ellipsis, argot, and breathless rhythm — transformed the French novel forever. This is an indispensable study of a writer who remains impossible to ignore and equally impossible to redeem, leaving the reader to wrestle with the most uncomfortable question in literary history: can great art survive a monstrous author?
Author: Merlin Thomas
Format: Hardback
Published: 1979, Faber and Faber, London
Genre: Biography
Condition remarks:
Condition: Good. Jacket: good. Page Condition: Good. Markings: No markings. Binding condition: Firm.
Few figures in twentieth-century French literature provoke as much fascination and controversy as Louis-Ferdinand Céline — the visionary author of Journey to the End of the Night whose genius was inseparable from his infamy. Merlin Thomas's critical biography charts the turbulent life and extraordinary literary output of this most contradictory of writers, from his working-class origins and harrowing experiences in World War I, to his emergence as one of modernism's most radical voices, and his eventual disgrace as a collaborator and anti-Semitic pamphleteer. Thomas brings rigorous scholarly authority to bear on a subject that demands both moral seriousness and literary sensitivity, tracing how Céline's hallucinatory prose style — defined by ellipsis, argot, and breathless rhythm — transformed the French novel forever. This is an indispensable study of a writer who remains impossible to ignore and equally impossible to redeem, leaving the reader to wrestle with the most uncomfortable question in literary history: can great art survive a monstrous author?