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LITERATURE

Five things not to miss at the Frankfurt Book Fair

From consulting a book doctor to immersing yourself in an author's world with the help of virtual reality, here are five things not to miss at this week's Frankfurt Book Fair, the world's largest publishing event.

Five things not to miss at the Frankfurt Book Fair
Photo: DPA

Page the (book) doctor

Feeling stressed? Heartbroken? Step into the book doctor's surgery and let an author prescribe the perfect book to cure you.

Think you know of a book that's just what the doctor ordered? Put on the white coat, take a seat behind the desk and tell the fair which tale has best helped you in the past.

A 'new' Rembrandt

It's a new work by Rembrandt but the Dutch master had nothing to do with it. A Dutch team used artificial intelligence and a 3D printer to create the portrait, based on a computer algorithm that worked out the average features of a typical 17th-century Rembrandt subject.

While art critics have balked at “The Next Rembrandt”, the creators say they believe the painter, an innovator himself, would have “laughed himself silly”.

Virtual reality

With this year's special focus on art and technology, there's also no escaping virtual reality at the fair. At Taiwan's stand, visitors can immerse themselves in the world of author Jimmy Liao's latest picture book by slipping on a headset that lets them interact with a little girl who has lost her dog, and help water her plant or play catch with her to cheer her up.

Social reading

They say book lovers never go to bed alone, but increasingly they don't read alone either. Millions of readers are connecting on websites like Goodreads, discussing books and posting reviews. On the popular Wattpad forum, authors and readers can even collaborate on stories.

At the fair this weekend, fans of Harlequin books and similar bodice-ripping tales who usually share their love of romance novels in online communities will bring it back to the real world, with a reading session and a meet-and-greet with authors – which will of course be live streamed.

A book to sink your teeth into

With Flanders as this year's co-guests of honour, chocolate had to be on the menu. Visitors can marvel at a two-by-one metre book, made from 950 kilos of dark and white chocolate.

It's completely edible and may look good enough to eat, but the quality is not quite up to Belgian standards, organisers from Visit Flanders say.

Instead, admire the book while you try one of the pralines made on the spot by a chocolatier.

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HISTORY

‘Lost’ manuscript of pro-Nazi French author published 78 years later

A book by one of France's most celebrated and controversial literary figures arrives in bookstores this week, 78 years after the manuscript disappeared

'Lost' manuscript of pro-Nazi French author published 78 years later

It is a rare thing when the story of a book’s publication is even more mysterious than the plot of the novel itself.

But that might be said of Guerre (War) by one of France’s most celebrated and controversial literary figures, Louis-Ferdinand Celine, which arrives in bookstores on Thursday, some 78 years after its manuscript disappeared.

Celine’s reputation has somehow survived the fact that he was one of France’s most eager collaborators with the Nazis.

Already a superstar thanks to his debut novel Journey to the End of the Night (1932), Celine became one of the most ardent anti-Semitic propagandists even before France’s occupation.

In June 1944, with the Allies advancing on Paris, the writer abandoned a pile of his manuscripts in his Montmartre apartment.

Celine feared rough treatment from authorities in liberated France, having spent the war carousing with the Gestapo, and giving up Jews and foreigners to the Nazi regime and publishing racist pamphlets about Jewish world conspiracies.

For decades, no one knew what happened to his papers, and he accused resistance fighters of burning them. But at some point in the 2000s, they ended up with retired journalist Jean-Pierre Thibaudat, who passed them – completely out of the blue – to Celine’s heirs last summer.

‘A miracle’
Despite the author’s history, reviews of the 150-page novel, published by Gallimard, have been unanimous in their praise.

“The end of a mystery, the discovery of a great text,” writes Le Point; a “miracle,” says Le Monde; “breathtaking,” gushes Journal du Dimanche.

Gallimard has yet to say whether the novel will be translated.

Like much of Celine’s work, Guerre is deeply autobiographical, recounting his experiences during World War I.

It opens with 20-year-old Brigadier Ferdinand finding himself miraculously alive after waking up on a Belgian battlefield, follows his treatment and hasty departure for England – all based on Celine’s real experiences.

His time across the Channel is the subject of another newly discovered novel, Londres (London), to be published this autumn.

If French reviewers seem reluctant to focus on Celine’s rampant World War II anti-Semitism, it is partly because his early writings (Guerre is thought to date from 1934) show little sign of it.

Journey to the End of the Night was a hit among progressives for its anti-war message, as well as a raw, slang-filled style that stuck two fingers up at bourgeois sensibilities.

Celine’s attitude to the Jews only revealed itself in 1937 with the publication of a pamphlet, Trifles for a Massacre, which set him on a new path of racial hatred and conspiracy-mongering.

He never back-tracked. After the war, he launched a campaign of Holocaust-denial and sought to muddy the waters around his own war-time exploits – allowing him to worm his way back into France without repercussions.

‘Divine surprise’
Many in the French literary scene seem keen to separate early and late Celine.

“These manuscripts come at the right time – they are a divine surprise – for Celine to become a writer again: the one who matters, from 1932 to 1936,” literary historian Philippe Roussin told AFP.

Other critics say the early Celine was just hiding his true feelings.

They highlight a quote that may explain the gap between his progressive novels and reactionary feelings: “Knowing what the reader wants, following fashions like a shopgirl, is the job of any writer who is very financially constrained,” Celine wrote to a friend.

Despite his descent into Nazism, he was one of the great chroniclers of the trauma of World War I and the malaise of the inter-war years.

An exhibition about the discovery of the manuscripts opens on Thursday at the Gallimard Gallery and includes the original, hand-written sheets of Guerre.

They end with a line that is typical of Celine: “I caught the war in my head. It is locked in my head.”

In the final years before his death in 1961, Celine endlessly bemoaned the loss of his manuscripts.

The exhibition has a quote from him on the wall: “They burned them, almost three manuscripts, the pest-purging vigilantes!”

This was one occasion – not the only one – where he was proved wrong.

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