The miraculous, long-lost final installment of the Death on the Installment Plan trilogy: London is the last key work of the legendary Louis-Ferdinand Céline
London centers on Ferdinand, the protagonist of Céline's London who is a gravely injured WWI soldier with a severe wound to his ear and suffers from both vertigo and the endless noise he can't stop hearing: I caught the war in my head. It's locked up inside my head. Ferdinand has earned a reprieve as well as a medal, and he has left France to join his prostitute friend Angèle in London. Despite his decoration, he nevertheless fears being sent back to the front and, in semi-hiding, takes up residence in an attic room where his pal Cantaloup runs an intense sex- trafficking operation. Colorful characters populate London: besides Cantaloup and Angèle, there is the generous poor Jewish doctor Yugenbitz, the corrupt cop Bijou, an eccentric English aristocrat, a slew of pimps, a rich variety of whores, and the revolutionary former bomb-maker Borokrom.
London is also a sweeping, grand-narrative-as-funhouse-mirror of Céline's own dual profession of medicine and writing: It's true I was sick and in a lot of pain and so I was justified. The consolation of having found Yugenbitz and the path, and the way that he'd given me hope to understand his beautiful work, that had sort of intoxicated me, I admit. I'm a little too enthusiastic about things of the mind. I'd have liked I think to cure all human diseases, so they'd never suffer again, the bastards. We're a strange lot, if we only admit it. Fine.
Autorentext
Louis-Ferdinand Céline (1894-1961) was a French writer and doctor whose novels are antiheroic visions of human suffering. Accused of collaboration with the Nazis, Céline fled France in 1944 first to Germany and then to Denmark. Condemned by default (1950) in France to one year of imprisonment and declared a national disgrace, Céline returned to France after his pardon in 1951, where he continued to write until his death. His classic books include Journey to the End of the Night, Death on the Installment Plan, London Bridge, North, Rigadoon, Conversations with Professor Y, Castle to Castle, and Normance.