Synopsis
Published in 1932, Louis-Ferdinand Celine's JOURNEY TO THE END OF THE NIGHT was a blistering, bilious, and brilliant assault on society, morality, and literary style. Told in a rambling first-person rant, filled with ellipses and raging tangents, the novel tells the life story (based in many respects on Celine's own) of Ferdinand Bardamu, a medical student who serves in the trenches of World War I, witnesses the atrocities of colonial Africa, travels to America to work for the Ford automobile company, and then returns to Paris to work as a doctor in the some of the city's most degraded slums. Nearly every page boils with Bardamu/Celine's nihilistic, misanthropic, vitriolic philosophy of 20th century life, his disgust only occasionally broken by an absurdist sense of humor. Celine expressed his damning views of humanity in a rapid-fire, stream-of-consciousness style that blended street slang and crass jokes with brooding contemplation--a revolutionary concept to the literature of the time. The novel caused an outrage across Europe, drawing praise and scorn in equal measures, a situation exacerbated by Celine's increasingly public anti-Semitism and Nazi sympathies. Still, long after his personal and political reputation was in shambles, writers continued to admire and emulate his primal scream of a first novel, and JOURNEY TO THE OF THE NIGHT is the clear literary grandfather to Henry Miller, the Beat Generation, and the novels of Charles Bukowski.
| Details | | Publication Date: | 1983-01-01 |
| Size | | Height: | 8.0 in | | Width: | 5.3 in | | Thickness: | 1.5 in | | Weight: | 15.2 oz |
Publisher's Note
The celebrated French author's first autobiographical novel takes Ferdinand Bardamu on a search for fulfillment and meaning through Flemish battlefields, Parisian alleys, American slums and factories, and back to the suburbs of Paris.
Industry Reviews
"Andre Gide hailed the book as an instant classic, while Leon Trotsky wrote that Celine 'had walked into the pantheon of great literature like walking into his own house.' No less than the stern figure of George Orwell, who described JOURNEY as 'a cry of unbearable disgust, a voice from the cesspool,' still judged it to be one of the best books he had ever read....The simple reason for this is that JOURNEY TO THE END OF THE NIGHT is shocking, powerful, funny, moving and, above all, a great story well told. It...is also a journey into the horrors of the 20th century....Reading JOURNEY is a challenge and a threat on every moral, political or philosophical front. It is this aspect of the novel that can make you feel sick, sad and despairing all at the same time. But in the end, it is Celine's language that takes the novel to a higher place, where poetry and vision meet the idiom of the street....And this is what makes Celine--even more than his despised enemy Marcel Proust--the most necessary author of the French 20th century."
(12/02/2002)
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