CÉLINE (Louis-Ferdinand). Guignol's band. Paris, Les Édition - Lot 83

CÉLINE (Louis-Ferdinand). Guignol's band. Paris, Les Éditions Denoël, 1944. In-16, 348 [of which the first 2 blank]-(4of which the last 3 blank)pp. in brown half-maroquin with corners, ribbed spine, covers and spine preserved, gilt head. First edition, one of 480 numbered copies on esparto, with the folding frontispiece outside the text that only copies on large paper have: a photographic view of the bow of a ship at quay (Jean-Pierre Dauphin and Pascal Fouché, 44A1). The London novel. Witness to a new advance in Céline's stylistic quest to perfect a recomposed oral language, Guignol's band is perhaps his only successful novel. A picture of London's French underworld, it is based with great interpretive freedom on Céline's stay in the English capital from May 1915 to May 1916, and on material he gleaned from his final travels there in the 1930s. In any case, Guignol's Band is the novel Céline carried around inside him the longest before writing it: envisaged as early as 1931, it occupied his mind for almost five years, from 1940 to 1945. The turning point of the war led him to publish the first part in this volume in March 1944 - the second part would only be published posthumously in 1964 under the title LePont de Londres.