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 Celine was the pen name of Louis Ferdinand Auguste Destouches (27 May 1894 - 1 July 1961). He was a French novelist, pamphleteer and physician. The name Celine was the first name of his grandmother. He is considered one of the most influential writers of the twentieth century, developing a new style of writing that modernized both French and world literature.