Louis-Ferdinand Celine has called his prose style 'the little music'. Celine is certainly capable of delicate, ironic, 'musical' writing, and you can find it easily in 'Journey to the End of Night' and 'Death on the Installment Plan'. Take one of his perfect, casual aphorisms in 'Journey': "[He] had the vice of the intellectual: he was futile." 'London Bridge' is the most excessive of Celine's books, flooded with exclamation marks and ellipses. Celine does not so much write as yell prose in 'London Bridge'. This is a book written entirely in italics, managing to sustain a mood of delirious excitement which never once modulates into anything more interesting or musical. It is a story of a youth and his dubious mentor, two Frenchmen, who are travelling abroad, and have found themselves in London. Ostensibly they are in London to get rich on the proceeds of the older man's invention - a revolutionary gas mask that will save the lives of Allied soldiers. But everything goes completely wrong from the start. The book is dominated by the protagonist Ferdinand's careening, drunken tours of the city's filthiest, sexiest precincts, and he has lots of wild violent adventures. No-one makes any money on the invention, of course. Everyone is broke and in a state of physical collapse by the end and the endless exclamations, bangings, crashings and frantic, sweat-slicked pursuits seem to have been calculated to wear the reader's nerves to a pulp. At its best, 'London Bridge' is funny, high-speed, carnivalesque farce. But so is the rest of Celine's output, and this book entirely lacks the backhanded profundity of, for example, his treatments of World War I, the follies of the bourgeoisie, colonial power and madness in 'Journey to the End of Night'. 'London Bridge' is more difficult to read than any work of Beckett. I never thought I would find a writer of whom I could say this. 'London Bridge' is the worst possible introduction to Celine - in it, he parodies himself. This work contains all of Celine's irritations and none of his rewards.

actually the rating is for the translation.

when i saw "london bridge" (guignol's band II), i was ecstatic as i had read all of celine's work available in english before it had come out (even searching out the then-out-of-print "north"-"castle to castle"-"rigadon" trilogy).

to my dismay i did not care for it as much as i had hoped.

for me (and others may have a different experience), i did not like the tone of the translation (but i did not like the translation of guignol's band I either). for me, london bridge felt self-conciously hip.

i much prefer mannhiem's translations of celine's work. perhaps i have come to equate his tone with celine's.

i think that journey and installment plan (both 5-star ratings)are better places to start with celine, then moving on to the afore-mentioned trilogy (4.5 stars each). if completeness is needed, i'd move on to the guignol's band series.

others may have a different viewpoint.

Louis-Ferdinand Celine has called his prose style 'the little music' inside of his ears. Celine is certainly capable of delicate, ironic, 'musical' writing, and you can find it easily in 'Journey to the End of Night' and 'Death on the Installment Plan'.

'London Bridge' is the most excessive of Celine's books, flooded with exclamation marks and ellipses. Celine does not so much write as yell prose in 'London Bridge'. This is a book written entirely in italics, managing to sustain a mood of delirious excitement which always modulates into more interestingly musical prose.

It is a story of a youth and his dubious mentor, two Frenchmen, who are travelling abroad, and have found themselves in London. Ostensibly they are in London to get rich on the proceeds of the older man's invention - a revolutionary gas mask that will save the lives of Allied soldiers. But everything goes completely wrong from the start. The book is dominated by the protagonist Ferdinand's careening, drunken tours of the city's filthiest, sexiest precincts, and he has lots of wild violent adventures. No-one makes any money on the invention, of course. Everyone is broke and in a state of physical collapse by the end and the endless exclamations, bangings, crashings and frantic, sweat-slicked pursuits seem to have been calculated to wear the reader's nerves to a pulp. At its best, 'London Bridge' is funny, high-speed, carnivalesque farce.

Most arrangements are oversimlified and repetitive. Stellar songs are reduced to bland, uninviting arrangements. Its a pretty disheartening collection. Its well worth the trouble of trying to arrange them yourself.

This compilation is boring and dull. Not worth the money!

I loved the sheet music in this book! It took all of Celine's 'greatest hit's' and put them in one book! I got this bok before I got the other sheet music books of hers and I was glad I did!!

This is what you call "overkill." How many books need to be written on Celine? The only book you need to get on her is the official biography and maybe her autobiography. This book by Sylvain is a waste of money. He is widely known among the Celine Dion community on the Internet as an arrogant loud mouth who spreads rumors that turn out to not be true. I don't know how in the world he got this published. Trust me, if you want an accurate book on Celine buy one that is official.

I'd say he's achieved his goal... If you don't have this book, how can you say you're a Celine fan? Best book on Celine... Also check out his wonderful website; it's the only one I go to for news on Celine, along with lyrics and translations.

I thought the information was helpful in that it provided a detailed planner, but I would have preferred some pictures. I enjoy getting ideas from actual pictures and there are none in this book, just a few very simple drawings.

I purchased the book for help planning a baby shower. There is very little information for baby showers. Most of the book (about 3/4) is devoted to bridal showers. For this reason, the title is very misleading.

Milton Hindus's faith in a form of poetic license was put to the test by his correspondence with, and eventual meeting with, the author Louis-Ferdinand Celine. Hindus himself compared them to the pair of hoboes in Beckett's Waiting for Godot, suggesting that only God could reconcile a relationship between the Jewish professor and the anti-Semitic author.

This peculiar entry in the Library of Conservative Thought examines Hindus's summer visit in 1948 to Celine, who was living in exile in Denmark for writing anti-Semitic editorials. Appended to that story is their correspondence from 1947 to 1949, an afterword and preface, both from 1985, and the introduction to the Transaction edition from 1997, near the end of Hindus's life. I think of it as a sad, coming-of-age story, the literary equivalent of the disappointed admirer trying to come to terms with his fallen hero.

The book implicitly raises some interesting questions about the relationship between the writer and his work, between the writer and his politics, and between the writer and society. If artists are as irrelevant as the utilitarians say, why the harsh treatment of men like Celine and Ezra Pound? Why did Socrates, while excluding poets from the republic, make an exception in the case of Aristophanes? Why was Celine the physician unable to diagnose or treat his own illness? Why did Walker Percy, another author-physician, blame so many human ills on society, the times, or bad metaphysics, rather than take the more classical route of self-knowledge, or face the hard-won discoveries of traditional medicine? When faced with such questions and contradictions, I recall the words of Russell Kirk: "From reading the ancients, I learned not to expect too much of life."

The truest statement in the book is that Celine is "completely sick, physically and mentally." Any remark outside this context, aside from being uncharitable, tells only a partial story. Suffice it to say I did not rush to the library to seek out his novels.

I cannot help thinking that Celine would have been less a splinter in the mind for Hindus if he had let go his faith in special pleading for the artist, and instead realized that they have feet of clay like the rest of us. Perhaps an admission like that would have diminished the sustaining faith in his lifelong vocation. To the end Hindus insisted that Celine was a divinely-inspired poet in the Romantic tradition who must be allowed special treatment, like the cabin boy in Moby Dick, accidentally thrust into deep waters, who emerged "crazy-witty," babbling and hallucinating. Unfortunately, the literary mind has been late in realizing that life does not create hallucinations. Only a sick mind does.