A shellshocked soldier in Flanders embarks on a dreamlike journey in this savage fragment of a tale written in the 1930s by the controversial author of Journey to the End of the Night

Caveat emptor: by all means buy this fascinating little volume, but do not expect to derive from it the pleasures usually associated with the reading of a novel. War is a soiled and bloodied fragment – one thinks of a journal lodged inside the tunic of a fallen soldier whose corpse has lain many days in the mud of the battlefield.

It was written in the mid-1930s, a couple of years after the publication of Céline’s first and hugely successful novel, Journey to the End of the Night, which it resembles in certain ways, though it is more bleak in outlook and more savage in tone, something which those who know the earlier book will think could hardly be possible. Here, as in Journey, we are addressed, or better say snarled at, by a narrator named Ferdinand, who sounds like a cross between an enraged toddler and a drunk who has fallen down and broken something. The result, for the reader, is at once exhausting and oddly bracing.