The scene opens in a smouldering orchard in Flanders, where the French soldier Ferdinand, shell-shocked, badly wounded and surrounded on all sides by mud, corpses and destruction, tries to find his way to safety and make sense of what has happened to him since he lost consciousness. His hallucinatory wanderings eventually take him to the military hospital of Peurdu-sur-la-Lys. There, after narrowly cheating death, he strikes up a friendship with a Parisian pimp and continues to be confronted with the moral chaos and side effects of war in all their vicious and repulsive senselessness and brutality.

Written around 1934, only a couple of years after Journey to the End of the Night, War shares its protagonist, its setting and many of its themes with Céline’s most celebrated novel. Its manuscript, considered lost after being looted during the Liberation of Paris, re-emerged in France in 2020, sparking a frenzy of interest and being hailed as a major rediscovery. Translated now for the first time into English, War is a powerfully vivid, unflinching, darkly comical exploration of the physical and mental trauma of the Western Front, which provides a fascinating missing link in the writing career of one of the greatest – and most controversial – authors of the twentieth century.

I feel called by his voice... In France, my Proust is Celine * Philip Roth *
Anyone can do the nastiness of life; it’s the rendering of the look and feel of the tumultuous that takes genius * Howard Jacobson *
He discovered a higher and more awful order of literary truth by ignoring the crippled vocabularies of ladies and gentlemen and by using, instead, the more comprehensive language of shrewd and tormented guttersnipes * Kurt Vonnegut *
The first of the unpublished novels rediscovered in 2021, War is a short, vivid, tragic and salacious text to be ranked alongside the author’s best work […] It constitutes a central piece of the immense literary puzzle that Céline obsessively crafted out of his own life. An event * London Review of Books *
War is a novel about survival as well as a cry of rage against war, against the Great Slaughter, which morally and physically traumatised the writer Céline * Le Monde des Livres *
Céline makes words perform a drunken dance, flouting grammatical rules and conjugations, but never compromising on rhythm or narrative economy * L’Express *

LOUIS-FERDINAND CÉLINE (1894–1961) was one of the most controversial authors of the twentieth century, a writer who mixed realism with imaginative fantasy, and, like his contemporary Henry Miller, an iconoclast who shocked many of his readers. His experiences as a soldier during the First World War and as a physician treating the poor in the suburbs of Paris gave him a jaundiced view of humanity, which he poured into a unique style of prose that is at the same time blackly humorous, daring and unsettling.