Cheap London Bridge: Guignol's Band II (Book) (Louis-Ferdinand Celine, Dominic Di Bernardi) Price

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Customer Reviews of London Bridge: Guignol's Band II

when i saw "london bridge" (guignol's band II), i was ecstatic as i had read all of celine's work available in english before it had come out (even searching out the then-out-of-print "north"-"castle to castle"-"rigadon" trilogy).

to my dismay i did not care for it as much as i had hoped.

for me (and others may have a different experience), i did not like the tone of the translation (but i did not like the translation of guignol's band I either). for me, london bridge felt self-conciously hip.

i much prefer mannhiem's translations of celine's work. perhaps i have come to equate his tone with celine's.

i think that journey and installment plan (both 5-star ratings)are better places to start with celine, then moving on to the afore-mentioned trilogy (4.5 stars each). if completeness is needed, i'd move on to the guignol's band series.

others may have a different viewpoint.

Give Celine to the Dogs
Louis-Ferdinand Celine has called his prose style 'the little music' inside of his ears. Celine is certainly capable of delicate, ironic, 'musical' writing, and you can find it easily in 'Journey to the End of Night' and 'Death on the Installment Plan'.

'London Bridge' is the most excessive of Celine's books, flooded with exclamation marks and ellipses. Celine does not so much write as yell prose in 'London Bridge'. This is a book written entirely in italics, managing to sustain a mood of delirious excitement which always modulates into more interestingly musical prose.

It is a story of a youth and his dubious mentor, two Frenchmen, who are travelling abroad, and have found themselves in London. Ostensibly they are in London to get rich on the proceeds of the older man's invention - a revolutionary gas mask that will save the lives of Allied soldiers. But everything goes completely wrong from the start. The book is dominated by the protagonist Ferdinand's careening, drunken tours of the city's filthiest, sexiest precincts, and he has lots of wild violent adventures. No-one makes any money on the invention, of course. Everyone is broke and in a state of physical collapse by the end and the endless exclamations, bangings, crashings and frantic, sweat-slicked pursuits seem to have been calculated to wear the reader's nerves to a pulp. At its best, 'London Bridge' is funny, high-speed, carnivalesque farce.

Celine's self-parody wears the reader's nerves to a pulp
Louis-Ferdinand Celine has called his prose style 'the little music'. Celine is certainly capable of delicate, ironic, 'musical' writing, and you can find it easily in 'Journey to the End of Night' and 'Death on the Installment Plan'. Take one of his perfect, casual aphorisms in 'Journey': "[He] had the vice of the intellectual: he was futile." 'London Bridge' is the most excessive of Celine's books, flooded with exclamation marks and ellipses. Celine does not so much write as yell prose in 'London Bridge'. This is a book written entirely in italics, managing to sustain a mood of delirious excitement which never once modulates into anything more interesting or musical. It is a story of a youth and his dubious mentor, two Frenchmen, who are travelling abroad, and have found themselves in London. Ostensibly they are in London to get rich on the proceeds of the older man's invention - a revolutionary gas mask that will save the lives of Allied soldiers. But everything goes completely wrong from the start. The book is dominated by the protagonist Ferdinand's careening, drunken tours of the city's filthiest, sexiest precincts, and he has lots of wild violent adventures. No-one makes any money on the invention, of course. Everyone is broke and in a state of physical collapse by the end and the endless exclamations, bangings, crashings and frantic, sweat-slicked pursuits seem to have been calculated to wear the reader's nerves to a pulp. At its best, 'London Bridge' is funny, high-speed, carnivalesque farce. But so is the rest of Celine's output, and this book entirely lacks the backhanded profundity of, for example, his treatments of World War I, the follies of the bourgeoisie, colonial power and madness in 'Journey to the End of Night'. 'London Bridge' is more difficult to read than any work of Beckett. I never thought I would find a writer of whom I could say this. 'London Bridge' is the worst possible introduction to Celine - in it, he parodies himself. This work contains all of Celine's irritations and none of his rewards.