Journey to the End of the Night - Hardcover

Celine, Louis-Ferdinand

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0714538000 ISBN 13: 9780714538006

Publisher: Calder Publications Ltd, 1980

Synopsis

First published in 1932, "Journey to the End of the Night" is
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 this title

Review

The 69 Greatest (Fiction) Travel Books of All Time: Wherever anti-hero Bardamu goes - Celine's unforgettably dark, caustic voice is there. -- Boris Kachka

The terrifying French novelist, Louis Ferdinand Celine-an enormously powerful and slashing, satiric, misanthropic writer. But what power of the imagination! --James Laughlin, founder of New Directions

Celine is my Proust!--Philip Roth"

Celine is my Proust!--Philip Roth

This is the novel, perhaps more than any other, that inspired me to write fiction. Celine showed me that it was possible to convey things that had heretofore seemed inaccessible.--Will Self

About the Author

Louis-Ferdinand Celine (1894-1961) was a French writer and doctor whose novels are antiheroic visions of human suffering. Accused of collaboration with the Nazis, Celine fled France in 1944 first to Germany and then to Denmark. Condemned by default (1950) in France to one year of imprisonment and declared a national disgrace, Celine returned to France after his pardon in 1951, where he continued to write until his death. His classic books include Journey to the End of the Night, Death on the Installment Plan, London Bridge, North, Rigadoon, Conversations with Professor Y, Castle to Castle, and Normance.

About this edition

• Publisher: Calder Publications Ltd
• Publication date: 1980
• ISBN 10: 0714538000
• ISBN 13: 9780714538006
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 448