War

"A more intense realization of the horrors of the Great War has never been written. The novel emerges, inevitably, to much reverberating argument over the good and evil of Céline's oeuvre 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. [But] the line between Céline's pamphlets and Auschwitz is direct; to pretend that it's not is to sin against history. But no one can easily forget, in this new book as in the older ones, the intensity of Céline's realization of the inexpungible human emotions of hatred and horror. When it comes to Céline, then or now, an ability to admire, a refusal to censor, and a readiness to condemn, should be--must be--part of a single compound response. Evil genius demands no less.--Adam Gopnik ""The New Yorker"" Guerre is breathtaking. Its immediacy, its ostinato of physical pain, its lewd and desperate milieu of wounded soldiers in a field hospital behind the front lines, will either repel or draw you with its sardonic wit and glints of tenderness and trapdoor twists of narrative.-- ""World Literature Today"""