![]() ![]() In Guignol's Band and its sequel London Bridge, you really have to pay close attention to the action to know exactly what's going on, although it's the ride with language that you're paying for – what the French critics often refer to as Céline's "délire". So, boosted by his antiwar spleen and snarling at authority, Céline pulls off the trick of being Henry Miller, John Steinbeck and James Joyce all at the same time. But the straightforward language is coupled, especially in the mid-period work, with a modernist disdain for clear exposition and holding the loathsome bourgeois reader's hand. ![]() The often colloquial, coarse and simple vocabulary he employed (his man-of-the-people credentials, the telling-it-like-it-is, although Céline also has a Captain Haddock-like talent for recherché invective) is heightened by the absence of long, aristocratic, Proustian sentences. His popularity was based on two opposing elements in his work. Céline has always had a loyal if small, following in the US with the beats and other beardy counterculture intellectuals (they like to skip over the Jew-bashing, but hey, Ezra Pound got away with it too). ![]()
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