The publishing world is in turmoil.

It must be said that this Thursday comes out a book of a monument of French literature of the twentieth century, decried by some and adored by others.

The lost manuscripts of Louis-Ferdinand Céline, which reappeared under mysterious circumstances, were indeed exhibited in Paris and gave rise to the publication of an unpublished work:

Guerre

.

These 6,000 sheets never published had been abandoned by the writer when he fled France for Germany in June 1944. Recovered by resistance fighters, they fell in the 2000s to a former journalist, Jean-Pierre Thibaudat.

The latter had to hand them over to the police and the writer's heirs, who revealed their existence in the summer of 2021. Céline's publisher, the Gallimard house, therefore publishes in its White collection this novel of some 150 pages, plus illustrations and appendices.

A dark, nervous and raw novel

In the purest tradition of the Céline novel, dark, nervous and raw,

Guerre

opens with the awakening of Brigadier Ferdinand, 20, miraculously alive on the battlefield at Poelkappelle in Belgium, one night in 1915. The writer tells how an English soldier saves him, then his convalescence not far from the front at Peurdu-sur-la-Lys (in reality Hazebrouck, in France), and finally a hasty departure for England.

The stay across the Channel will also be the subject of another unpublished, longer,

London

, to be published in the fall.

War

was probably written in 1934, shortly after the scandal of Céline's first novel,

Voyage au bout de la nuit

(1932).

The anti-Semitic turning point, of which the writer will never repent, dates from 1937, with the publication of the pamphlet

Bagatelles pour un massacre

.

“I caught the war in my head.

She's locked in my head"

The War

and

London

manuscripts

"come at the right time or by a divine surprise, as you wish, for Céline to become a writer again: the one who matters, from 1932-1936", believes Philippe Roussin, researcher specializing in Céline.

The pamphleteer is indeed unanimous against him.

But the novelist occupies a place of choice in the history of the genre, for having shattered bourgeois literature, conventional narration and style, by translating the anguish of the interwar period.

Showing his trauma of "hairy", seriously injured, and his creative frenzy of the 1930s is the bias of the exhibition which opens this Thursday at the Gallimard Gallery, "Céline, the found manuscripts".

Sheets are framed, including the first of

War

, which ends with what should become a cult quote from Céline, emblematic of the obsessive hammering of the cannon in the story: “I caught the war in my head.

It's locked in my head."

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