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. 

It begins in media res; not because the author was engaging in modernist experimentation, but because the first half (or perhaps more) has not been unearthed. This means that there are frequent references to a character we never meet — Le Drelliere — and his convoy of men, which has been decimated. Other characters’ names change. The discovered manuscript was clearly a work in progress.

This doesn’t cause a problem for the reader. What might, on the other hand, is the narrative voice, which complains, snarls, and hectors the reader like a loudmouthed teenager in a pub. Celine’s characters speak the language of the French working class; specifically here, that of young soldiers. The translator has made the decision to give us an English equivalent of that, which works, in the main.

We find the narrator, Ferdinand, wandering half-dead in Flanders. There are detailed descriptions of corpses, rats and his own life-threating injuries. He ends up in a military hospital in Peurdu-sur-la-Lys, and it is there and thereabouts that the action takes place. He makes friends with Bebert/Cascade, a Parisian pimp, who brings his wife to the town for the purposes of prostitution, a decision he will live to regret.

Other recurring characters are the narrator’s respectable petit-bourgeois parents, a friend of theirs named Harnache and a nurse called Miss L’Espinasse, who may or may not be spending her evenings coming to Ferdinand’s bed to masturbate him. It is unclear if this is a fever dream, a product of Ferdinand’s illness and drug regime, or not.

Always present is the war, of course, and the threat of courts martial for both Cascade and Ferdinand, who may have deserted their regiments.

From our perspective in 2024, it is clear that Ferdinand is suffering from PTSD in some form or other. He seems to have internalised the sound of cannons, has frequent physical convulsions brought on by various noises and smells, and oscillates between nihilism and a youthful, if sometimes obscene, romanticism. 

Here’s an indicative section: “Kicking the bucket isn’t so hard, it’s all the bollocks running up to it that drains the poetry out of you, the butchery, drivel and torture that precede your death rattle. You need to die young or be rich.”

Often, his musings take the form of direct address, plus temporal glimpses into an unclear future hint that we may be reading a diary written later.

It is easy to read the nihilism as indicative of a writer who was only a few years away from espousing anti-semitic views and admiring fascism. There is a clear road from one to another. I think that would be a simplification, though. Rather, we are presented with a war memoir, but not in the style of Graves, Sassoon or Owen, but more like a transplanted Charles Bukowski or James Kelman. There is also something in here of Kerouac, if he’d had the misfortune to find himself involved in the horrors of the trenches.

Like with those writers, the prose may be an acquired taste, but it transports the reader into a visceral, hostile, fatalistic world that is at once familiar and unfamiliar. Sander Berg’s translation has aided in this, as the narrative voice does feel contemporary, while being rooted in the 1910s. It is never anachronistic; rather, the temporal voice is maintained through careful consideration of the right balance between the universal and the particular.

It’s not an easy read, and there are only fleeting occasions where the reader is given someone with whom they can identify. But the language is wonderfully rhythmic and there are times when the reader is reminded of a period where language could transgress the mores of its time; this is particularly evident in the excruciating dinner table scene at the Harnaches. 

As a non-conformist and self-described anarchist, Celine’s desire to shock would lead him down some very unpleasant roads. The first of his anti-semitic pamphlets would be only three years later. But what we have in this short work is evidence of a great stylist, and someone who could speak in the language of the working-class soldiers who were being blown to bits in the war to end all wars.