Casse-pipe

Begun as early as 1936 as a sequel to Mort à crédit, Casse-pipe was intended to form the third part of a vast autobiographical cycle inaugurated with Voyage au bout de la nuit. The manuscript, long thought lost after the Liberation, was partially recovered and published in December 1949 by Éditions Chambriand, while Céline was living in exile in Denmark. This fragment of some 150 pages, depicting the young Bardamu’s military life in a dragoon regiment on the eve of the Great War, portrays the absurdity of barracks life and the brutality of military hierarchy, transfigured by Céline’s distinctive style: syncopated language, popular verve and bursts of wit. The novel was meant to form an immense fresco of the pre-war years, a mirror of French society on the verge of collapse, but remained truncated in this first publication.

The story took a new turn in summer 2021, when several thousand unpublished Céline manuscript pages were rediscovered, including the complete manuscripts of Casse-pipe: this discovery casts new light on the project and restores the full significance of the interrupted literary undertaking. The Chambriand edition thus retains capital importance as the first published state, marked by its author’s precarious circumstances and exile.

A fine copy, beautifully bound.