journey to the end of the night by louis ferdinand céline

This is life as it is, Céline states, and so lifelike does the writing seem that we cannot resist. He derived this kind of radical naturalism, it seems, from Émile Zola, whom he admired, but his naturalism, unlike Zola’s, lacks any element of French “humanism,” meaning a call to pity or a desire for reform. No human appetite or reflection, however shameful or audacious, is alien to Céline, and no resource of language, no matter how “low” or demotic, forbidden. Cain-like title of “ Death on the Installment Plan.” Céline is revered, by writers ranging from Kurt Vonnegut to Philip Roth, for a relentless psychological realism. The novel emerges, inevitably, to much reverberating argument over the good and evil of Céline’s œuvre and its meanings, about whether his literary value can be separated from the vile anti-Semitism of his political pamphleteering, and how we should respond to the whole.Ĭéline, or Louis Ferdinand Auguste Destouches, to give him the name under which he was born and long practiced medicine-apparently, very conscientiously, in the Paris suburb of Clichy-is the author of two novels from the nineteen-thirties that are essential to the modern imagination: “Voyage au Bout de la Nuit” (“ Journey to the End of the Night”) and “Mort à Crédit” (“Death on Credit”), published in English with the rather James M.

The opening passage-rats, head, corpse, and all-comes, unsurprisingly in its effect, though surprisingly in its existence, from Louis-Ferdinand Céline, whose newly discovered novel, “Guerre” or “War,” has just been published, in France, by Gallimard. A more intense realization of the horrors of the Great War has never been written, and the passage makes other famous descriptions of the trenches seem arty and unrealized: Hemingway in “A Farewell to Arms,” self-consciously poetic Remarque in “All Quiet on the Western Front,” quietly polemical.

The soldier, who seems to have internalized, permanently, the noise of the cannons, wanders through a field of death in desperate search of friendly troops. In the first pages of the book, we lie alongside corpses, while a soldier-who will prove to be the consciousness of the narrative-his ear stuck by blood to the soil and his head shaken by the sounds of explosions, wonders if his wounded arm is even still attached to his broken body nearby, two rats rustle through the rucksack of another corpse in search of food.

Journey to the end of the night by louis ferdinand céline