Together with his wife, Lucette, and their cat Bébert, he left his apartment in Montmartre and took a train to Germany. Céline was the author of several anti-Semitic pamphlets and a friend of the Nazi occupiers. “I no longer believed that we would see the manuscripts,” admits François Gibault, who, together with Véronique Chovin, is the executor of Céline’s estate. It’s locked in my head.” This is the story of a headache, an endless noise and of one of the last mysteries of contemporary French literature. “So I always slept with a terrible noise since December 1914. It was written in 1934, two decades after the events it describes. I fell asleep in this noise and then it rained a heavy rain,” the 150-page book begins. Between the two there was an immense noise. “The whole ear on the left was glued to the ground with blood, the mouth too. The author of Journey to the End of the Night has become the literary star of the year in France. The Gallimard publishing house is publishing the first of the texts extracted from these manuscripts: Guerre (War), a raw and fast-paced account of the months in which Céline was wounded in Flanders at the beginning of World War I. The newspaper Le Monde calls it “a miracle.” The lost manuscripts of Louis-Ferdinand Céline (1884-1961), perhaps the most brilliant and abject of French 20th-century writers, have come to light after almost 80 years in an unknown location.
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