ANDY HEDGECOCK relishes two exhibitions that blur the boundaries between art and community engagement
The language of the working class soldier
MARTIN HALL steps gingerly through a fragmentary novel about WWI by one of France’s greatest prose stylists, and most notorious fascist sympathisers

War
Louis-Ferdinand Céline, translated by Sander Berg, Alma Classics, £14.99
A NEWLY discovered novel by one of France’s most celebrated writers is not a common occurrence. When that writer is Louis-Ferdinand Celine, anti-semite, collaborator and friend of fascists, there may be some readers who would prefer that it had been left lost.
However, War, written in 1934 but only discovered in 2021, is very much worth your time.
More from this author
The phrase “cruel to be kind” comes from Hamlet, but Shakespeare’s Prince didn’t go in for kidnap, explosive punches, and cigarette deprivation. Tam is different.

ANGUS REID deconstructs a popular contemporary novel aimed at a ‘queer’ young adult readership

A landmark work of gay ethnography, an avant-garde fusion of folk and modernity, and a chance comment in a great interview

ANGUS REID applauds the inventive stagecraft with which the Lyceum serve up Stevenson’s classic, but misses the deeper themes
Similar stories

LEIGH WILSON applauds the new translation of a novel from 1932 that is a hymn to values inimical to the forces that were growing in Germany in the early 1930s

ANDY HEDGECOCK relishes a novel by a dazzling prose stylist and a subtle player of literary games

MARTIN HALL relishes a meticulous, groundbreaking and erudite history of Serbia 1804-1941

Transmorphed into a romp in the Caribbean, the play effortlessly wins over the audience, writes GORDON PARSONS