- Hardcover: 448 pages
- Publisher: Calder Publications Ltd; New edition edition (Jun 1988)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0714538000
- ISBN-13: 978-0714538006
- Product Dimensions: 21.4 x 14.4 x 4.4 cm
- Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars See all reviews (17 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 651,897 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Description
Book Description
First published in 1932, "Journey to the End of the Night" is
regarded as Celine's masterpiece.
regarded as Celine's masterpiece.
It is told in the first person and is based on his own experiences during
the First World War; in French colonial Africa; in the USA - where he
worked for a while at the Ford factory in Detroit - and later as a young
doctor in a working class suburb in Paris. The novel gives a picture of
those years as seen by an underdog.
Celine is very much the product of his age and was particularly marked -
like so may other writers - by the senseless carnage of the First World
War.
Celine's disgust with human folly, malice, greed and the mess that man has
made of society and of his own environment lies behind the bitterness and
bile that distinguishes his writing and gives it its force. This is
exemplified in the superb portraits of mainly ordinary human beings coping
with their lives as best they can; caught in poverty or their obsessions -
hindered from evading traps of their own making by ignorance and
prejudice.
This is the only complete translation of the novel available in English.
About the Author
Celine is one of the most controversial writers of the twentieth
century, a writer who mixed realism with imaginative fantasy, and like his
contemporary Henry Miller, who is much compared to him, an iconoclast who
shocked and frightened many of his readers. Celine, the pen name of L.F.
Destouches, was a Doctor in poor Parisian districts whose experience of the
misery and chicanery of the poor gave him a jaundiced view of humanity that
he poured into prose, that is comic, as well as often frightening and
obscene.
century, a writer who mixed realism with imaginative fantasy, and like his
contemporary Henry Miller, who is much compared to him, an iconoclast who
shocked and frightened many of his readers. Celine, the pen name of L.F.
Destouches, was a Doctor in poor Parisian districts whose experience of the
misery and chicanery of the poor gave him a jaundiced view of humanity that
he poured into prose, that is comic, as well as often frightening and
obscene.
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Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Back Cover
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Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Back Cover
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
15 of 17 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
"From up high where I was, youcould shout anything you liked at them. I tried. They made me sick,the whole lot of them. I hadn't the nerve to tell them so in thedaytime, to their face, but up there it was safe. "Help!Help!" I shouted, just to see if it would have any effect onthem. None whatsoever. Those people were pushing life and night andday in front of them. Life hides everything from people. Their ownnoise prevents them from hearing anything else. They couldn't careless. The bigger and taller the city, the less they care. Take it fromme. I've tried. It's a waste of time." --from Journey to the Endof the Night
Journey is very much what it sounds like -- a looselyautobiographical wandering that starts with the author enlistingalmost by accident to fight in WWI. He doesn't waste time describingthe war as being a giant, immoral waste of everyone's time and life,really, with thesoldier's main mission of the day being little morethan looking for a place to eat without getting his head shot off. Andto treat it as anything more than that, Celine suggests, is somethingof a waste of time: What's more important to any discussion of warthan its inherent stupidity? The same, it seems, goes for the rest ofthe story -- the basic undercurrent of the story is the world's coreidiocity and how you deal with it (if you choose to). Bardamu,Celine's alter ego, heads for the USA and back, into the slums ofParis and the Congo, and never manages to escape the stupidity andbrutality of the men around him. It's not a story of escape,butunderstanding, you do what you can with what you have. Soon the onlyway to keep the rest of the world at bay is to use the terror tacticsof those around you in reverse... and of course, it's only a matter oftime before that backfires as well...
7 of 8 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
A French globe trotting Dr becomes embroilled in the Paris subculture, the more he struggles to suceed the deeper he sinks, until the only way to find peace is to embrace 'the night', and give himself over to it. Rejection, dejection, slavery and depravity become everyday events for the young doctor in his journey to the end of the night. A dark story full of wit and the blackest humour, it will make you itch, scratch, laugh and weep. A sobering tale with a bottle of Pernod waiting in the wings.
21 of 25 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
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.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
The dark side of the face
This is the famous French fictional autobiographical novel of Louis-Ferdinand Celine written between the World Wars in 1933. Read more
Published 23 days ago by H. Tee
Not for the faint hearted
Bile, black bile, dredged from gouging out his liver, holding it aloft and then wringing it dry over shreds of paper and then coughing, spluttering, every scrap of his stomach over... Read more
Published 4 months ago by Dr. Delvis Memphistopheles
iodiosyncratic black humor
Intense, dark, viscious, the choppy sentences, written in the vernacular are gripping as they are direct. Read more
Published 4 months ago by TMODN
Overlooked classic
It seems amazing to me how little credit this work now gets, and how few people have heard of it. I understand why in the light of Céline's infamous pamphlets, but as a... Read more
Published 6 months ago by Samandyjohn
A powerful portrait of poverty, war, colonial horrors and the cruelty...
This disturbing novel almost won the Prix Goncourt Prize for fiction, the most notable award at the time for French fiction. Read more
Published 11 months ago by R. G. White
Get a different edition
Amazing book but get a different edition as this one is very badly bound. Clumps of pages falling out and blowing away as you try to read ruin the experience.
EDIT ... Read more
EDIT ... Read more
Published 21 months ago by Julian Manning
Interesting in places, terribly hard work
This is the account of Bardamu, a man so damaged by his experiences in World War I that he can no longer see anything good in anybody. Read more
Published on 6 Feb 2010 by Mr. Nigel JB McFarlane
Slimy goodness for the stinking proletariat, open your maws and eat...
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 more
Published on 5 Aug 2006 by Useless Article
Irrefutable
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. Read more
Published on 20 Mar 2006 by L. Heaney
Hubris
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 ... Read more
Published on 17 July 2004 by Clement Wether
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