Ballets without music, without dancers, without anything / Louis-Ferdinand Céline ; translated from the French by Thomas and Carol Christensen.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Céline, Louis-Ferdinand, 1894-1961.

Series:

Green Integer (Series) ; 18.

Green Integer (Series) ; 18

Standardized Title:

Ballets sans musique, sans personne, sans rien. English

Language:

English

French

Physical Description:

187 pages : illustrations ; 16 cm.

Place of Publication:

København ; Los Angeles : Green Integer, 1999.

Summary:

Celine's fascination with the ballet spans his literary career: three of the pieces in this volume were written around the same time that he published his great novel, Voyage au bout de la nuit, which he dedicated to the dancer Elisabeth Craig. At the time of his death, according to his wife--also a dancer--he was planning a book devoted to dance. "A man who doesn't dance confesses some disgraceful weakness," he wrote Milton Hindus. "I put dancing into everything."

In 1936, after finishing his monumental second novel, Mort a credit, Celine visited Russia, where he hoped to have some of his ballets performed at the Theater Marinski in Leningrad. He failed to get any of them performed. But through this period he continued writing ballets. In 1959 five ballets were collected by Editions Gallimard with illustrations by Eliane Bonabel. The result is this edition, never before published in English, that reveals a central concern of Celine's writing while simultaneously displaying his comic structures and the struggle between idyllic beauty and inescapable deterioration, death, and the grotesque of his great fictions.

Contents:

Scandal in the Deep 19

The Birth of a Fairy 80

Wicked Paul. Brave Virginie 105

Van Bagaden 130

Slings and Arrows 139.

Notes:

Translation of: Ballets sans musique, sans personne, sans rien.

ISBN:

1892295067

OCLC:

42894021