What a great quote from the great Monsieur Céline. He had other forbidden thoughts:
A Newly Discovered Céline Novel Creates a Stir
You can’t separate what’s powerful about his writing from his vile anti-Semitism.
By Adam Gopnik
June 15, 2022
In the first pages of the book, we lie alongside corpses, while a soldier—who will prove to be the consciousness of the narrative—his ear stuck by blood to the soil and his head shaken by the sounds of explosions, wonders if his wounded arm is even still attached to his broken body; nearby, two rats rustle through the rucksack of another corpse in search of food. The soldier, who seems to have internalized, permanently, the noise of the cannons, wanders through a field of death in desperate search of friendly troops. A more intense realization of the horrors of the Great War has never been written, and the passage makes other famous descriptions of the trenches seem arty and unrealized: Hemingway in “A Farewell to Arms,” self-consciously poetic; Remarque in “All Quiet on the Western Front,” quietly polemical.
The opening passage—rats, head, corpse, and all—comes, unsurprisingly in its effect, though surprisingly in its existence, from Louis-Ferdinand Céline, whose newly discovered novel, “Guerre” or “War,” has just been published, in France, by Gallimard.
The novel emerges, inevitably, to much reverberating argument over the good and evil of Céline’s œuvre and its meanings, about whether his literary value can be separated from the vile anti-Semitism of his political pamphleteering, and how we should respond to the whole....
More, here:
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultu ... tes-a-stir