Word: guignol
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Guignol's Band, by Louis-Ferdinand Celine. A preposterous but amusing nightmare about pimps, trollops and deadbeats in World War I London (TIME, June...
...Guignol's Band, by Louis Ferdinand Celine. A preposterous but amusing nightmare about pimps, trollops and deadbeats in World War I London (TIME, June...
...GUIGNOL'S BAND (287 pp.)-Louis-Ferdinand Cèline-New Directions...
...pace and din of Guignol's Band are too fast and deafening to hold up to the very end, and the string of fantastic adventures grows increasingly limp and raveled. By then Cèline has, as always, succeeded in hammering his sharpest hallucinations deep into the reader's head. Spit-curled Cascade, lantern-bearing Dr.Clodowitz, sovereign-stuffed Titus van Claben-such characters are engraved in the memory for keeps. No visitor since Thomas Wolfe has described London with such off-beat perception and passion-not the London the tourist or the Briton has ever seen...
...answer in the case of 'Guignol's Band is yes. The reader cannot become involved with the characters of the book because there is nothing sympathetic about them, and the action adds nothing to what the reader retains. The impressions are vivid, and in the impressions association is possible; but one wonders whether a chapter is not long enough to convey the tragedy of human beings lost and alone in the world...