The mindless persistence of the libido amid so much torment becomes the book’s illustrative macabre joke ... The frenetic, staccato intensity of his writing feels original even now ... But there is so much that is soiling and stupid about this man that one begins to wonder whether it’s really worth putting in the delicate effort of separating the art from the artist.
British readers may prefer Mandell’s more measured translation ... She’s content not to look for colourful synonyms and turns of phrase, careful not to make Céline’s narrator sound any more hysterical and thereby reduce him to a comic fool ... The novella suffers in comparison to Céline’s finished books, which the author reworked tirelessly.
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 ... It is an extraordinary work, hysterical in tone and demented in content. Had it been completed, it might have been a masterpiece; as it stands, or staggers, it is deeply disturbing and horribly compelling.
The writing recalls, at a useful time, the necessary truth that war is not some abstract heroic occupation played as a global board game but an unimaginable terror where human beings are consumed by pain only to end in death. But Céline’s reputation is indissoluble from his strange political fate ... Céline’s chief trait, his chief virtue, is that he is systematically horrible, and without a glimmer of hope.
A hallucinatory romp through the early days of the First World War ... For Ferdinand as much as for Céline, the war’s consequences go beyond personal traumas, with patriotism becoming a tenuous veil for the sickness and tensions pervading civilian life. The movement between these two worlds drives much of the comedic punch of the novel.
Like Céline’s best work, War opens with a jarring immediacy ... These disorienting, almost hallucinatory opening pages, in which a severely wounded Ferdinand navigates the war-ravaged Western Front, are the strongest in the book and stand up well alongside, and maybe even above, other literature that emerged from the Great War ... War, being an unfinished work, pales in comparison to Journey to the End of the Night and Death on the Installment Plan.
