REPRINTS AND NEW EDITIONS

Press, Volume CXII, Issue 33095, 9 December 1972, Page 10

REPRINTS AND NEW EDITIONS

North. By Louis-Ferdinand Celine. The Bodley Head. 454 pp. Glossary. Celine is a writer who immediately reminds one of Vercors, whose book about an idealistic young Nazi officer being billetted in France was a literary sensation during the war. Celine’s vision is totally different—he was himself a Fascist—but his material is much the same, a view of wartime Europe in which ideals ultimately matter less than boots. “North,” which was first published in French in 1960, one year before Celine’s death, has a heavily autobiographical flavour, though at what point memory merges into fantasy is impossible to determine because of the elusive, fluid style, rather like a stream-of-consciousness in place?. In outline, "North” deals with the narrator’s travels in 1944 out of Paris and through Germany to an expatriate settlement The description of this place, with its heterogeneous, cosmopolitan population is probably the most powerful part of the book, and the events which follow as the Allied offensive intensifies take on a bizarre, nightmarish aura. The rather elastic narrative style of this novel is most appropriate to the somewhat hallucinatory quality of much of it: however, on the other hand, this is by no means an easy book to read, and it demands both persistence and sustained concentration. T he Egoist. By George Meredith. The Bodley Head. 423 pp. Gewge Meredith will always be rememtored for his observations on the nature of comedy, and in his masterpiece, “The Egoist," one sees these ideas deployed with consummate sKill. In his introduction to this new edition, V. S. Pritchett makes the preditable comments about how Meredith bridges the gap between the midyictonans and writers like Woolf, Lawrence, and Forster, but concludes by observing that “Meredith is a waster of contrivance, such a master ’ 3t ," 6 * s inclined to hold up his “Vels by contriving too much.” His “rif comparison between Meredith ,ere ( as wed as Restoration is most perceptive, and aware of Meredith’s formal ShSk’’ and , the keen social sense sympatf&b? him towards feminist