Louis-Ferdinand Céline is probably the most influential French author of the last hundred years. Guerre, which means “war,” is a novel that he wrote and virtually completed in the Thirties. Apparently he intended it to be the centerpiece of a trilogy that he never got round to writing, and the draft of Guerre remained part of his personal archive. Gallimard, probably the most influential French publishing house of the last hundred years, is treating publication as a unique and posthumous literary sensation, and the initial print run of Guerre is a massive 80,000 copies.
