Journey to the End of the Night

Rating:
Summary: I loved it when i was 17
Review: I still love this book, although today it is a bit harder for me to accept his message. I first read Celine when i was 17 and it changed me completely into a nihilist and a misanthrope. this may scare some of the readers of the book but i guess being both of them hedious things is something a person has to go through. Certainly after being a Nihilist and a Misanthrope for 3 years (i was changed upon reading Dostoevsky who started the whole movement) i understand these feelings and views better. I believe one must write it for it's petulant anti-war message, it's contempt for human-race and the corruption of all sacred concepts and ideas. It's Powerful and provoking and well worth reading and spending 3 years of your life detesting the human race.

Rating:
Summary: Necessarily outrageous
Review: Some readers will no doubt disparage Celine's Journey to the End of the Night for its pessimistic and misanthropic leanings. Nonetheless, I found that beneath the stark, unsettling realism of its prose lies a keen insight to all things human. Celine's brand of compassion (like Nietzsche's, Bukowski's and Vonnegut's) is difficult for many people to stomach: amoral, apolitical, and undeniably, but necessarily, outrageous. It is the outrageousness of Celine's ideas, embodied in the novel's anti-hero, Bardamu, that I find most valuable. His incessant rantings and ravings, his unfaltering nihilism, his petulance, and his self-induced, overall miserableness excel in rocking us out of our boredom and complacency. This extremism forces us to revaluate our own morality, and reminds us of the importance of keeping life, death, and everything else, in perspective.

Rating:
Summary: Savage, nasty but brilliant.
Review: I'd recommend this book for anyone who's truly interested in 20th century literature precisely because it's so harsh. It's the greatest adolescent rant ever written, but there's more to it than that. It's an incredible antidote to nice middle class literature. If you want a "nice" story don't read it. I can understand the reluctance to accept an author known for his anti semitism and fascist sympathies. Nevertheless nasty people sometimes write great books and this is one of them.

Rating:
Summary: One of the worst novels I've ever read
Review: Celine is one of the 20th century's great writers? Hardly. Granted, I read the book in English, but I have to imagine that the translator served his author well. A good part of my dissatisfaction with Celine's wearing and wearying jeremiad against society is due to my age. If I were 20 (the time when one is most susceptible to his sort of French anomie), I probably would have loved it. Now that I'm 43, I think Celine is full of merde. I remember reading in a biography of Allen Ginsberg that he and William Burroughs (I think it was Burroughs) once visited Celine to pay him homage. If I had visited Celine, it would have been to belt him in the mouth. Celine rants incessantly against human cruelty, yet was a notorious Nazi collaborator. That aside, 400-plus pages of the snide whinings of a reprehensible, morally insolvent jerk really taxed my patience. Celine also stretched my credulity; I found it hard to believe his narrator was a doctor (which Celine was, too). Working my way to the end of this book was a chore I never want to repeat. I give the book one star because I thought the scenes in Africa were fairly interesting. Overall, though, Journey to the End of the Night is one of the worst novels I've ever read. Getting through it chapter by chapter was definitely Death on the Installment Plan.

Rating:
Summary: The homeopatic virtue of poetry
Review: These pages were for me water in the desert, deep water for drowning, down where fire burns with this water all around, and at the gates of hell a voice, and you recognize this voice as yours. In this night a dawn. The hardness of memory is necessary to fragility of forgetting. Celine vomits out words for silence.

Rating:
Summary: PATHETIC AND HYPOCRITICAL
Review: I worry about the poor lost souls who rave on about how good this book is. I can only imagine these are the same people listen to the Doors endlessly, thinking Jim Morrison was a "poet" (HA!) and own every book Bukowski ever churned out. (Bukowski was one of the worst, most hypocritical writers of the century. His work is also shockingly brainless.) So-called "artists" like Celine, Morrison, and Bukowski will forever be the refuge for those poor souls too impatient and unintelligent to read true writers like Dos Passos and Byron. These so-called "artists" are also the most hypocritical of any I have known. Especially Celine. He raves on about how no known understands compassion any more and how he's suffering so much (Bukowski did this as well) and then casually laughs as someone beside him is blown away, and says "good-riddance". HYPOCRITICAL NONSENSE. And I feel sorry for anyone who truly enjoyed this book because . If you did, what can I say, you have a lot of growing up to do.

Rating:
Summary: The most influential book of this century
Review: When most of us think of the great writers of the centuries, most people can agree on a few of them. Dostoyevski, Cervantes, Swift, Proust, Joyce, but the name Celine usually brings about either extreme contempt or quiet ignorance, neither of which are deserved. None of his books prove that more than "Voyage Au But De Las Nuis", a virtual mass of hallucinations and distortions that have proven more real than the realities that provoked them. No, there aren't the ellipses, the fragmented thoughts (or "my three dots...my supposed original style...real writers will tell you what they think" as he mockingly said) that became his trademark technique, but both the blackness and the humour have never been in better form. Yes, I have read all of his works, and yes I will always scream that his books should be taught to schoolkids all over, and I know that ideas like that would only be seen as the "degredation of our youth", if you want to see where 20th Century Literature REALLY sprang from (go ahead, look it up...most of the greatest authors of this century from Henry Miller on have claimed Celine, and, especially, this book, as the springboard for their artistic triumphs. Miller, Gunter Grass, Kerouac, Burroughs, Bukowski, Joseph Heller, Kurt Vonnegut, Norman Mailer, Kenzabura Oe, Nin, and the list can keep going), "Journey"s definately the place to start. The world definately takes a much darker shade afterwards...

Rating:
Summary: A paranoid stroll concerning nausia in the modern world
Review: I heard of "Journey to the end of the night" from mentions of Celine in the works of Charles Bukowski.Not an easy to track down I eventually read the book and was not disappointed.The basic narritive covers twenty odd years,following Ferdinand Bardamu through encounters in World War one,a mental hospital,the Congo,the Untited states and back to Paris in Medical capacities.The book examines an anti hero who believes in nothing and more importantly despises anybody who does. The reaccouring charactor of Robinson acts as a sort catalyst for Ferdinand. From their meeting in the dark slaughter fields in the Flanders.Celine uses their friendship to let him(Bardamu)to act as the observer to the various anti-social escapades of Robinson.This drives the narrative through the book The book throughout is one of the most relentlessly pessimistic pieces I have ever read.People are seen constantly as boorish idiots ie brainless officers,all women,Native Africans,Parisian patients-the list is endless.However what comes across is that to succeed in life it helps to be like this. Cut off all emotion(espically false ones like love) and your decrepid,miserible fleash will have some moments of pleasure until you scrivil up and eventually die.So why read such an expression in unremitting nilism? For new readers in thie gender(note Bukowski,Knut Hamsum,Celine) prepare yourself for the extreme closeup of the degregation and uselessness of human life.However in this book what appealed to me was the humour.He takes his instances and examples of life so far that his inherent bile becomes quite farcical.A good example is his trip to the Congo by sea where gradually the ships contigient of "war heros" decide in unision to attack Bardamu.The building of paranoid tension on a contained environment becomes quite slapstick in its desperation. On one level its horrible yet all part of a human comedy that laudes human failing.Grahem Greens "Comedians" explains this notion better that I ever could.So Celine uses misery to poetray an array of expressions,one being comedy.Good examples in the book are,Robinsons attempts to kill an old lady,Bardamus descriptions of officers,his attempts to make human contact in New York,the brilliently realised wasting of the French in the congo.The attempts to train natives who use sticks for arms with utter enthuaism.False dreams and ignorance on display.Over exaggeration is the key. The actual writing style is fast and streamlined, in so as pages disappear in block linked paragraphs. The paradoxical nature of the novel is also a major part of Celine's style that should be noted.Anti war but caught up in jingoism,seeing indiviualism as vanity yet hating being a number in a factory, Failure as a Doctor, false ideals,waistful deaths of children---it go's on and on. However I'll leave with this,as time is short and I always have better things to be doing. Read this bookfor no other reasion than to boost a dark dreary Winter evening.So sit back and indulge in self pity. Know and accept that you are stuck in a world full of idiots.A little excorism can sometines improve your day(perhaps thats what Celine wanted---Who knows?------

Rating:
Summary: How does Celine's "decent dead" transcribe in French?
Review: Feel the fatalism of Princhard, who is about to become hamburger at the hands of the "military-commercial combination". Celine's precise statement precedes Eisenhower's famous farewell speech by 30 years. Eisenhower, the peace-wager!! Wow.

Rating:
Summary: My God this book was dull.
Review: I finished it and still wonder why I bothered.