London Bridge

A major work by one of France's most important authors of the twentieth century, London Bridge is a riotous novel about the London underworld during World War I. Picking up where its predecessor Guignol's Band left off, Celine's semi-autobiographical narrator recounts his disastrous partnership with a mystical Frenchman (intent on financing a trip to Tibet by winning a gas-mask competition); his uneasy relationship with London's pimps and whores and their common nemesis, Inspector Matthew of Scotland Yard; and, most scandalously, his affair with a baronet's fourteen-year-old daughter, an English angel whose descent into vice is suspiciously smooth.
Written in his trademark style - a headlong rush of slang, brusque observation and quirky lyricism, delivered in machine-gun bursts of prose and ellipses - Celine re-creates the dark days during the Great War with sordid verisimilitude and desperate hilarity.