Review of War by Louis-Ferdinand Céline

A nasty brutish and short book. 

 But rewarding. The perils of war. We follow Ferdinand, a wounded soldier, as he is taken in and variously abused by nurses and doctors. As he inhabits the tenuous zone of the infirmary, striking out periodically to escape an uncertain fate, he is haunted by the memories of his near-death experience and tortured by his persistent wounds. Full of the bravado and black humor the author is infamous for, without all of the ellipses he became obsessed with using in his later style, this work, which comes to us from beyond the grave, is a shattering death rattle. Makes me wonder if the Swiss academy, if they had read this book before awarding Céline the Nobel Prize, if they would have lumped him into the category of Pynchon – as they labelled that author too pornographic to win the prize. This may be Céline’s most graphic work, but it’s short length and fast pace will put the reader in mind of Ernst Jünger. His style is rollicking, intense and intimate. The highly personal internal monologue drives the action and contributes to an uncertainty in the main character’s mental stability.
I will always be a fan of Céline’s eloquent tirades. For me, this was a page-turner. A surprise-a-minute thriller, lacking in literary pretension and startlingly honest in its depiction of warfare, no doubt compiled first-hand in the trenches, tromping through the meat and gristle of a war zone. Was Céline a hero or a coward, or simply a great artist forced to endure tragedy and pain? Did that pain forge his soul into a cynical machine for satire and psychological insight? Did it render him inhuman or more human? These are the questions the book is likely to raise.