Product Description

First published in 1932, "Journey to the End of the Night" is
regarded as Celine's masterpiece.

It is told in the first person and is based on his own experiences during
the First World War; in French colonial Africa; in the USA - where he
worked for a while at the Ford factory in Detroit - and later as a young
doctor in a working class suburb in Paris. The novel gives a picture of
those years as seen by an underdog.

Celine is very much the product of his age and was particularly marked -
like so may other writers - by the senseless carnage of the First World
War.

Celine's disgust with human folly, malice, greed and the mess that man has
made of society and of his own environment lies behind the bitterness and
bile that distinguishes his writing and gives it its force. This is
exemplified in the superb portraits of mainly ordinary human beings coping
with their lives as best they can; caught in poverty or their obsessions -
hindered from evading traps of their own making by ignorance and
prejudice.

This is the only complete translation of the novel available in English.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #75239 in Books
• Published on: 1991-09-26
• Binding: Paperback
• 448 pages

About the Author
Celine is one of the most controversial writers of the twentieth
century, a writer who mixed realism with imaginative fantasy, and like his
contemporary Henry Miller, who is much compared to him, an iconoclast who
shocked and frightened many of his readers. Celine, the pen name of L.F.
Destouches, was a Doctor in poor Parisian districts whose experience of the
misery and chicanery of the poor gave him a jaundiced view of humanity that
he poured into prose, that is comic, as well as often frightening and
obscene.

Customer Reviews

Slimy goodness for the stinking proletariat, open your maws and eat literature!
To read books like Journey or Death on Credit to works like Ulysses is to think of the sound the words make in your mind. Read them aloud inside your head and the reading becomes easy, let the language move, like lyrics in a song. Ulysses is a positive expression of mans existence and Celines view is the opposite. Celine verbal ballet is perhaps not for everyone, in later works he sounds like a irritable grumpy old man, whose own failings are blamed on everyone else; it becomes a tedious tune to listen to. Nihilistic self-disgust and a hatred of the human condition can only be fun for so long, before it turns to poison. As a man he was probably a loathsome little creep, involved in the Vichy regime, it seems he wanted to blacken and char his reputation; so others would loath him as much as he did. His ego let him down, but in the process it created a very interesting literary legacy. Okay, this is an over-simplistic review (hey, this is an amazon amateur review for the unwashed masses), but I hope you get the drift, this is a difficult book, but essentially worth the effort to consume over 400 pages. Most books that go on for this long could have done with some editing, this is no different, but it seems to fit with Celines personality. All diatribes tend to go on for too long.It is Celine that is at the heart of this novel, deep down it's all about Celine. Celine against the world. This is not to say the books are not without some human decency or a clever sense of humour. There is a charred humour here.
Then add the hindsight that this author would side with a political regime that sided with those who committed acts of evil on a monumental scale, a man whose beliefs damned him.

I recommend other authors if you like Celine. Picaresque novels like Cervantes work, Rabelais ouvre, Blaise Cendrars work like Gold or Moravagine. Knut Hamsun- Hunger. Nonsense like Flicker by Theodore Roszak (apparently now being made into a film by Darren Aronofsky...)

Other novels not related to Celine I'd recommend if you liked the previous list:
Jan Potocki "The Manuscript Found In Saragossa". I love this book dearly, as I do Life: A Users Manual by George Perec.The City of Marvels by Eduardo Mendoza

Picaresque Crime Fiction: David Peace: his Red Riding quartet: 1974, 1977, 1980, 1983, a queasy epic of ugly times and ugly people. A vision of Hell sketched around real events in Yorkshire. If you like James Ellroy, you like this just as much.

Irrefutable
This books is an opus of the last century, and in truth is the finest book I have read. Issues of style, content and humanity all make this one of the best books.
Celines voyage commences in darkness and remains in darkness but the slivers of hope and insight he offers are astounding.

Refreshing
I live in Ireland in 2005, it's funny how our own corrupt, drunken, unsympathetic and acquisitive little country bears no fundamental difference from the world as described by Celine. Far from being depressed by this knowledge I find it liberating, I am confirmed in my view that human nature remains constant, change is slow and the semblance of civilisation is but a illusion manufactured and promulgated by a weak and spineless media.