A Trudge in the Snow

For the last three days we have gotten some very heavy snow. I have listened to the snowblowing enthusiasts slowly give up as each morning passes and the work they did the day before gets buried in yet another round of the white fluffy stuff. Even the snowplows seem to have decided to call it mostly a day. Some of the main roads are clear-ish, but we are nowhere near the main roads. And, you know, those roads are still rural highways.

So, we had the option to dig the car out to go and get some essential supplies (specifically DMC 780, because I am currently working on NightSpiritStudio’s Skeleton Queen, and I was running low), or we could walk the ten minutes to one of our local craft stores. It wasn’t that difficult of a choice — we walked. It felt great to have the snow coming down all around us, and to see how picture-perfect it can make everything look. I haven’t seen icicles so long since I was a kid, and the snow on top of most roofs is over a foot deep. We are truly buried.

A Bit of Background

Louis-Ferdinand Céline was a doctor who was born in France near the turn of the last century. He wasn’t a good person. In fact, he was a very notably bad person who ended up working as a Nazi collaborator and then getting run out of France after the war. When that happened, he claimed that he had left two manuscripts behind that were destroyed by the Résistance. Again, Céline was a very bad man and no one believed him.

Until 2020, when those very manuscripts turned up. War (Guerre) is one of them, and I was excited to read it — not because I’m a big fan of Céline, but because it’s a small piece of lost history that didn’t actually end up being lost.  Now, all they need to find is a copy of Tod Browning’s London After Midnight.

War and Writing About It

Perhaps what makes War so effective as a novel is Céline and his very distinctive style. He is a writer that is full of contradictions. Bawdy and doleful, funny yet horrifying, awful yet oddly poetic. I could go on, but I won’t bore you. Céline uses his contradictions to point out the hypocritical nature of war and warfare, the rhetoric versus the reality. The reader can definitely suffer from whiplash as Céline describes the terrible injuries of soldiers, but then careens straight into discussing the gossip on the hospital ward.

I will warn that there are plenty of triggers here, including violence and misogyny, as Céline writes out every part of his own brutal, immoral self. He does so for an effect, but it can still be too much for some readers, so approach with caution.

Unfinished Business

It’s fairly clear that this novel isn’t exactly a finished work, let alone a polished one. The structure meanders, the narrative ends abruptly. New Directions even thought it best to include a guide to characters in the back matter. There’s a lot to get out of this slim novel, but calling it a novel is almost stretching it — since it is quite far from what I would call complete. For example, some characters even change names for no apparent reason halfway through the book, which is typical of an early draft.

All that being said, I am glad that the publisher decided to leave it in this state. The temptation is always to finish unfinished works, which is very human and very understandable. However, there’s something powerful in letting something stand as it was left, and to leave it to the reader to wonder what the intention was and how a work could have been finished. It’s also a rare glimpse into a writer’s process or lack of process and how they went about putting their ideas together in a raw form that doesn’t usually fall under any eyes save their own.

Trudging Today, Shovelling Tomorrow

Today we stayed away from the shovels and fate seems to have rewarded us because more snow is on the way so it wasn’t like we would have made much of an impact. But then I wonder…will the new snow crush the old snow into that awful icy underlayer that is oh so deadly?

Sometimes with Canadian winter it feels like you just can’t win.