Is now the right time to publish a novel by Louis-Ferdinand Céline?

This is the opening passage of “Guerre” (“War”), a long-lost novel by Louis-Ferdinand Céline. It has been translated into English for the first time, with two new translations released in June. The tale is largely autobiographical. Born in 1894, Céline was wounded in Flanders at the start of the first world war. He recounted the horrors of conflict in his fiction, writing in a colloquial style characterised by its slang, gutter jokes and bleak view of humanity.