Journey to the End of the Night by Louis-Ferdinand Celine. New York. 1983. New Directions. 081120846x. Translated from the French by Ralph Manheim. 446 pages. hardcover. Cover drawing and design by Harold Wortsman.
DESCRIPTION - Few first novels have had the impact of Louis-Ferdinand Céline's Journey to the End of the Night (1932). Written in an explosive style that fairly jumps off the page, the book shocked most critics but found immediate success with the French reading public, which responded enthusiastically to the violent misadventures of its petit-bourgeois antihero, Bardamu, and his scabrous nihilism. His military experiences in the first years of World War I, his travels to colonial French West Africa, New York, and Detroit, his return to postwar France and his beginning medical practice in the slums of suburban Paris—all these have some parallels with the real life of the author. However, repeated attempts to prove the novel strictly autobiographical have become exercises in academic futility: the picaresque extravagance of this twentieth-century classic clearly marks it as a forerunner of absurdist black humor. The publication of Ralph Manheim's translation of Journey to the End of the Night follows some years after his rendering into English of its companion novel, Death on the Installment Plan. Manheim, more than any other translator, has been able to capture the savage energy of Céline's French, drawn from the Parisian argot he made his own.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Louis Ferdinand Auguste Destouches (27 May 1894 – 1 July 1961), better known by the pen name Louis-Ferdinand Céline was a French novelist, polemicist, and physician. His first novel Journey to the End of the Night (1932) won the Prix Renaudot but divided critics due to the author's pessimistic depiction of the human condition and his writing style based on working-class speech. In subsequent novels such as Death on the Installment Plan (1936), Guignol's Band (1944) and Castle to Castle (1957), Céline further developed an innovative and distinctive literary style. Maurice Nadeau wrote: "What Joyce did for the English language...what the surrealists attempted to do for the French language, Céline achieved effortlessly and on a vast scale." From 1937 Céline wrote a series of antisemitic polemical works in which he advocated a military alliance with Nazi Germany. He continued to publicly espouse antisemitic views during the German occupation of France, and after the Allied landing in Normandy in 1944, he fled to Germany and then Denmark where he lived in exile. He was convicted of collaboration by a French court in 1951 but was pardoned by a military tribunal soon after. He returned to France where he resumed his careers as a doctor and author.Louis Ferdinand Auguste Destouches (27 May 1894 – 1 July 1961), better known by the pen name Louis-Ferdinand Céline was a French novelist, polemicist, and physician. His first novel Journey to the End of the Night (1932) won the Prix Renaudot but divided critics due to the author's pessimistic depiction of the human condition and his writing style based on working-class speech. In subsequent novels such as Death on the Installment Plan (1936), Guignol's Band (1944) and Castle to Castle (1957), Céline further developed an innovative and distinctive literary style. Maurice Nadeau wrote: "What Joyce did for the English language...what the surrealists attempted to do for the French language, Céline achieved effortlessly and on a vast scale." From 1937 Céline wrote a series of antisemitic polemical works in which he advocated a military alliance with Nazi Germany. He continued to publicly espouse antisemitic views during the German occupation of France, and after the Allied landing in Normandy in 1944, he fled to Germany and then Denmark where he lived in exile. He was convicted of collaboration by a French court in 1951 but was pardoned by a military tribunal soon after. He returned to France where he resumed his careers as a doctor and author.Céline is widely considered to be one of the greatest French novelists of the 20th century, and his novels have had an enduring influence on later authors. However, he remains a controversial figure in France due to his antisemitism and activities during the Second World War.
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