Journey to the End of the Night

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Summary: A book to change the way you look at humanity.
Review: Celine apparantly wrote 50,000 pages of notes before condensing them into the book. Fifty years after publication, it still has the power to shock. From the battlefields of WW1 to the dehumanising factories of America. Not a book to be read while depressed, it revolutionised writing by its irreverance to institutions, religions and humanity itself. In later works Celine was accused of racism (he had some very questionable views) but this book treats all of us black or white, christian, jew etc...with an equal distain, relieved periodically by hilarious observations. This is the kind of book that can change you life utterly.

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Summary: Brilliant book exposes literature to life
Review: I wish I would have been alive and living in France when this book was released in 1932. What a shock it must have been! Of course, the fact that it was a best-seller is entirely ironic; there is nothing about this book that is conventional.

What the book consists of is a personal, semi-autobiographical journey into the life of a Paris doctor for the poor and his adventures in WWI, in Africa, working for General Motors in America, and finally for a sanitorium in France. In each instance, the culture de jour is analyzed, reconfigured, and often trashed. Celine says what he means... And if these dots mean anything to you... You'll know you're hooked, too!... Easily one of the five most important books published this century. Everything after it would take SOMETHING...

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Summary: I enjoyed it & did not commit suicide; this is good, I think
Review: Celine's humor and sinister tone throughout each and every paragraph provide an almost hostile environment in which many authors would get lost and be unable to maintain such thorough darkess. He never wanders far from humanity, for all he depicts is human nature as if from an alley, severe yet believable, unsafe but well lit. It's frightening if you can identify with the non-existence he describes so well. Cindy C. A. Pereira ([e-mail])

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Summary: Lightnings of style in the night of experience
Review: Celine once said he wrote to make other writers unreadable. While this may strikes as a strange project, I would agree, with many others, that it was largely fulfilled. Throughout his life, Celine evolved a very personal, "jubilatoire" (sorry, my first language is French) style that does make most of modern French authors look like zombies. "Journey", Celine's first book, includes unexpected borrowings form colloquial, spoken French. A look to further works, however, shows that these borrowings were only a starting point for a unique work on the French language. From the night of his personal experience, Celine reaches through language to ultimate elegance, light and lightness - a transfiguration arguably difficult to translate into English. Jacques P. Du Pasquier Geneva, Switzerland Editor of Hache, http://www.unige.ch/hache

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Summary: A cynical book brimming with black humour
Review: If you want to know how the survivors of the first world war felt and thought, this is the book to read. It is possible to follow the thought processes that led many of these young men to later embraces the totalitarian ideologies.
The anti-hero of the book survives the war, but bitter and cynical. He thought he had fought to save civilization, but everything is chaos and dissolution when he returns. Idiots rule. Everywhere he turns corruption and stupidity are rife.
He tries to go to colonial Africa as a doctor.
Celine has a unique writing style; a sentence (the length of a breath) followed by three dots. It is a difficult way to write, but he carries it off. Celine is truly hailed as one of the finest stylists of the twentieth century, but he is also infamous for serving as a minister in the Vichy regime in second world war France.

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Summary: An Unforgetable Novel!
Review: Journey to the End of the Night is very much what it sounds like -- a loosely autobiographical wandering that starts with the author enlisting almost by accident to fight in WWI. He doesn't waste time describing the war as being a giant, immoral waste of everyone's time and life, really, with the soldier's main mission of the day being little more than looking for a place to eat without getting his head shot off. And to treat it as anything more than that, Celine suggests, is something of a waste of time: What's more important to any discussion of war than its inherent stupidity? The same, it seems, goes for the rest of the story -- the basic undercurrent of the story is the world's core idiocity and how you deal with it (if you choose to). Bardamu, Celine's alter ego, heads for the USA and back, into the slums of Paris and the Congo, and never manages to escape the stupidity and brutality of the men around him. It's not a story of escape, but understanding, you do what you can with what you have. Soon the only way to keep the rest of the world at bay is to use the terror tactics of those around you in reverse... and of course, it's only a matter of time before that backfires as well. This is truly a "must read" classic; it's the type of book that will dwell in your memory, informing your opinion of humanity and the world, for years. Don't hesistate to buy a copy. Also recommended is Ask the Dust by John Fante and The Losers' Club by Richard Perez, another novel that I can't stop thinking about.

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Summary: Life-affirming as well as ferociously humanistic
Review: This novel, despite the blurb on its cover touting its "scabrous nihilism," actually winds up also affirming our struggle to keep such nihilism at bay. As we read on pg. 189: "What with being chucked out of everywhere, you're sure to find whatever it is that scares all those bastards so. It must be the end of the night, and that's why they're so dead set against going to the end of the night." The start reminds me of the post-WWI antiwar novel by Remarque, "All Quiet on the Western Front," or the later Dalton Trumbo screed "Johnny Got His Gun." The African section energizes a Conradian "Heart of Darkness" by bringing in more recognizably human characters rather than archetypes. Sergeant Alcide and the family bringing their rubber to trade at the store both leap off the page, and what Chinua Achebe has labored for many chapters to convey here becomes conveyed dramatically, ironically, and memorably in much fewer paragraphs.

The American episodes recalled for me Kafka's "Amerika" with their mix of comedy and confusion amidst industrial and urban freneticism. Celine anticipates Orwell's "Down and Out in Paris and London," which Eric Blair was exploring at the same time, roughly, as the latter part of Celine's epic. The return to France, not even halfway through the book, and the subsequent medical pursuits, arrive at not even the halfway point of the book, and you wonder how the plot (such as it is) will continue.

The humanism does reoccur, if sporadically, and every page contains aphoristic wisdom, often wittily if no less honestly uttered by Ferdinand. I'd like to find out, after reading this, how much "really" happened to Celine and how much was invented or revamped. I suppose, more than most authors, that the ties between reality and imagination on the page are drawn tighter than usual, in the style of "autobiographical fiction" like Francis Stuart's "Black List, Section H," by another author who found himself pursuing for the sake of artistic integrity less than popular stances during WWII. No surprise, as I'm reading Anthony Cronin's Beckett bio, that Sam was influenced by Celine, too. As such a work of uneasy inspiration from a raucous mind, Celine's craft might fall short of the formal perfection expected from the highest caliber of "classic" authors, but he errs for honesty's sake. He castigates modernism and transcends it. Instead, he pioneers existentialist 20c statements that challenge the primacy or the substitution of art for God.

I understand that Celine's later works fall much more into this darker zone between self-justification and self-release by prose. This novel was worth every long moment it took. It flows rapidly, yet demands close attention, curiously. You cannot enter into the mind of Ferdinand without being shaken up, and the author's narrative voice demands your full engagement. A bracing and novel, to use the French and the English terms, experience. In the end, you remember the moving moments of generosity, courage, and defiance amidst the grime and gloom.

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Summary: Masterful - changed literature - w/o him, no Vonnegut
Review: This writer changed literature. From his writings, Journey and Death on Credit are ABSOLUTE REQUIREMENTS for the canon that is contemporary literature. Without Celine, we would have no basis on which to rest Kerouac, we would be missing, dare I say, Kurt Vonnegut as we know him. This writer influenced them all. You can not help but hate him in his manifest destiny of dismal sadness. Nothing is good enough for him, he is cynical, sees life as ultimately humiliating. He does have moments of joy. Moments of immense pleasure. But he undoubtedly is so honest, in such a breathtaking cacophony of seriously detailed life-description, that he just blew the lid off the whole prim, proper experience that was "literature". Without him, you'd think Bukowski invented it. Bukowski is good, but Celine did it first, and perhaps, better.


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Summary: The wrong man in the wrong place
Review: Have you ever felt like that? Ever had the feeling that there is something terribly wrong with the way society works and most other people think and live? Ever felt exploited, or even worse, felt that the only way you have to get on well in this world is to exploit others? You will find a delightfully subtle potrait of this experience in the history of poor Bardamu, first tossed in a war as "cannon meat", then in colonial africa as a corporate slave, then in the consumistic, maddening, squallid american society and finally involved in the every-day miseries of his own french society. In his cynical voyage he shows you the bestiality of war, the obtusity of the myriads of men that let themselves be
sent to death for the wealth of of a few privileged ones, the savage exploitation of colonial africa, the obscene vulgarity and mechanization of american society and the horrors that hide behind the calm facade of burgeois society and yet under it all you can sense a subtle vein of gentle idealism and regret.
From youth to old age, look at life of a potentially good man, whose good nature and quest for a meaning in life have been thwarted by our disgustig "human society". And all in the words of a true master of the language. I strongly recommend it to young people, as an true eye-opener and to "prepare them for life". As for who considers it dated...even a cursory look at central africa today, or at at the Iraq war will quickly prove how terrible actuality of this book.

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Summary: You need another review to convince you to read this book?
Review: Louis-Ferdinand Céline, originally named Louis Ferdinand Destouches, is a celebrated French writer, second to only Proust in the 20th century, and this is his first published book, one of many more to come. Published in Paris in 1932, a few years before Joyce's Ulysses in the same country..

I recommend this book to those who'd like to read a radical account and point of view of an honest human being who values (his) life above all else; above nationalism and moral virtues... all this in France during WW1. This theme, verily present in Journey, is in some sense why Celine is associated (in spirit) with Nietzsche. Celine's second novel, Death on Credit, is part 2 of the story of Bardamu, the main character and the narrator of this book.