Customer Reviews

Fable for Another Time (French Modernist Library)

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Celine once wrote that those who don't imitate him are doomed, that he is Literature's favorite child. He's right. Fable for Another Time is proof. I'm in awe of this novel - it's a lot like the brilliant "Castle To Castle," only denser, perhaps too dense for a mass audience. He's at the peak of his literary talent here, but he's also been driven insane by his time in the Danish prison and the death sentence that hung over him in France, and that insanity hasn't yet settled down to the cranky humor of "Castle." A novel to re-read and re-read for the sheer pleasure, bile and beauty of it all.

One has to admire the courage of the translator. To tackle Celine's astonishing (poetic) raving and make it come through and together, so that you keep on reading, is quite an accomplishment.
Everything is here, au pair with the best of Celine's book-rants. What madness!
In retrospect, Celine defintely looms like one of the elect few grandmasters of the 20th century writing. Perhaps the greatest 20th centrury French author in the grand tradition going back to Rabelais and over to les poets maudits (Rimbaud, Verlaine, Baudelaire).
What raving genius!

I really enjoyed Fable For Another Time. If you are a big fan of Celine's work you will too! The book moves rapidly as the main character tells his tale of time spent in a prison. I think out of all of Celine's novels, the one shows the most about him.

Celine is at it again in *Fable for Another Time,* this time spitting and spewing from a Danish prison cell where he's been thrown while the French try to decide what to do with him--pardon him, or execute him for collaborating with the Nazis. For his part, Celine maintains his innocence and shows no remorse for anything--instead he's filled with characteristic disgust and bitterness at the hypocrisy of those who condemn him. The personal vendettas indulged in here in scathing diatribes risk turning *Fable* into a scandalous gossip column about people long dead and who the average reader needs extensive footnotes to even identify. This is always the risk of Celine's later work, especially when he turns his attention from the rottenness of the human race as a whole, and focuses on the rottenness of particular specimens instead.

In *Fable,* Celine attacks his enemies against a refrain of lamentation of the hardships of prison life--the bellowing lunatic in the next cell, chronic constipation ((he hasn't gone in two weeks as he never tires of telling us--so you can only imagine the mood he's in!)), hunger, and constant physical threat, as well as loneliness, hopelessness, and grinding mental and physical collapse. But it's not all gloom and doom from the pit. As Celine himself remarks, he's full of humor--jokes and gags are his specialty, just what the doctor ordered, the way Celine transcends the horror and injustice. He interrupts his pell-mell narrative with periodic sales pitches to an imaginary readership to buy *Fable* --and to buy it often. Three or four copies per reader aren't too many! The general public, though, he sadly acknowledges, reads only mindless garbage. A long soliloquy on a preoccupation with rectal health and a fear of cancer is grimly hilarious, especially poignant if one tends to hypochondria--and tellingly metaphoric: we should all pull our heads out, if you catch my drift. And Celine's antic portrait of an infamously lecherous and legless Montmartre artist who has compromised even Celine's beloved Lili is perhaps the highlight of the entire volume.

Curiously, *Fable* combines what is best in Celine with what is weakest--at least from a contemporary reader's point of view. As a who's who of contemptuous stinkers of a bygone day it's always at the risk of arousing the apathy of old gossip about the largely forgotten. As a comic and picaresque adventure of peculiar characters and outrageous situations it's hugely entertaining. But it's as one man's indignant rant against the crumminess and inhumanity of humanity that it remains both hilarious and relevant. If you look even closer, you also see what is so often missed in Celine: the power of the human will to turn tragedy into comedy and to transmute life, if not into something actually worth living, at least into something a little more bearable. In that, Celine is priceless.

For a novel whose translator takes some pain in all but describing as untranslatable, one wonders what is missed from Celine's original. One suspects a lot--one fears Celine himself. Nonetheless, a text that Celine fans will want to read, *Fable for Another Time* contains enough of what is timeless in Celine to still be rewarding.

Brilliant ! And very relevent to our day and age.

As the preface says - "for animals, for the sick, for prisoners".

Bebert the cat was the most sympathetic figure I could find in the book.

I couldn't book the book down.