London Bridge

(Paperback)

Publishing Details

Classifications

Physical Properties

Description

A major work by one of Frances most important authors of the twentieth century, London Bridge is a riotous novel about the London underworld during the First World War. Picking up where its predecessor Guignols Band left off, Clines narrator recounts his disastrous partnership with an eccentric Frenchman intent on financing a trip to Tibet by winning a gas-mask competition; his uneasy relationship with Londons pimps and whores and their common nemesis, Inspector Matthew of Scotland Yard; and, most scandalous of all, his affair with a colonels daughter. Written in his trademark style a headlong rush of slang, brusque observation and quirky lyricism, delivered in machine-gun bursts of prose and ellipses Cline recreates the dark days during the Great War with sordid verisimilitude and desperate hilarity.

Reviews

'The most blackly humorous and disenchanted voice in all of French literature...' London Review of Books

Author Bio

Louis-Ferdinand Cline was one of the most controversial authors of the twentieth century, a writer who mixed realism with imaginative fantasy, and like his contemporary Henry Miller, an iconoclast who shocked and frightened many of his readers. Cline, the pen name of L.F. Destouches, was a doctor in poor Parisian districts whose experience of the misery and chicanery of the poor gave him a jaundiced view of humanity that he poured into prose that is comic as well as often frightening and obscene.