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: #268852 in Books
• Published on: 1991-09-26
• Original language: French
• 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

Starts in the gutter and keeps sinking, a grim masterpiece.
A French globe trotting Dr becomes embroilled in the Paris subculture, the more he struggles to suceed the deeper he sinks, until the only way to find peace is to embrace 'the night', and give himself over to it. Rejection, dejection, slavery and depravity become everyday events for the young doctor in his journey to the end of the night. A dark story full of wit and the blackest humour, it will make you itch, scratch, laugh and weep. A sobering tale with a bottle of Pernod waiting in the wings.

Compelling Power
"From up high where I was, youcould shout anything you liked at them. I tried. They made me sick,the whole lot of them. I hadn't the nerve to tell them so in thedaytime, to their face, but up there it was safe. "Help!Help!" I shouted, just to see if it would have any effect onthem. None whatsoever. Those people were pushing life and night andday in front of them. Life hides everything from people. Their ownnoise prevents them from hearing anything else. They couldn't careless. The bigger and taller the city, the less they care. Take it fromme. I've tried. It's a waste of time." --from Journey to the Endof the Night

Journey is very much what it sounds like -- a looselyautobiographical wandering that starts with the author enlistingalmost by accident to fight in WWI. He doesn't waste time describingthe war as being a giant, immoral waste of everyone's time and life,really, with thesoldier's main mission of the day being little morethan looking for a place to eat without getting his head shot off. Andto treat it as anything more than that, Celine suggests, is somethingof a waste of time: What's more important to any discussion of warthan its inherent stupidity? The same, it seems, goes for the rest ofthe story -- the basic undercurrent of the story is the world's coreidiocity and how you deal with it (if you choose to). Bardamu,Celine's alter ego, heads for the USA and back, into the slums ofParis and the Congo, and never manages to escape the stupidity andbrutality of the men around him. It's not a story of escape,butunderstanding, you do what you can with what you have. Soon the onlyway to keep the rest of the world at bay is to use the terror tacticsof those around you in reverse... and of course, it's only a matter oftime before that backfires as well...

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.