Journey to the End of the Night (New Directions Paperbook) by Louis-Ferdinand Celine Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of Journey to the End of the Night (New Directions Paperbook)
Book Review: Better than Fiction
Summary: 5 Stars
Don't begin this book expecting a wild melange of colloquial rants - Celine is hilariously articulate. The genius of this work lies in its utter cynicism (i.e., truth-telling), bitter humour and uniqueness. It shows you how dull and pointless bourgeois experimental fiction (Joyce, et al) really is. Vital, emotional, inspirational.Book Review: Hubris
Summary: 5 Stars
To imagine that we have somehow "transcended" the deathly message of "Journey" ... that we have, in the intervening years since its writing, outgrown its critique ... that we are 'better than that now' ... truly is a self-deluding but completely unsurprising state of affairs. Celine transfixes the ugly, petty, ignorant cant & hypocrisy of human intercourse ... most people won't enjoy the experience ... as the man writes: "life consists of madness spiked with lies ... the truth is inedible" ...
Celine's great & furious disappointment [read "Fable For Another Time"], is that his collaboration with the Nazis let us off the hook ... we need no longer take his vision seriously ... no, not much.
Book Review: Refreshing
Summary: 5 Stars
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.Book Review: Irrefutable
Summary: 5 Stars
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.
Book Review: Slimy goodness for the stinking proletariat, open your maws and eat literature!
Summary: 4 Stars
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.