Journey to the End of the Night (New Directions Paperbook) - Softcover

Céline, Louis–ferdinand; Manheim, Ralph; Vollmann, William T.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0811216543 ISBN 13: 9780811216548

Publisher: New Directions, 2006

Synopsis

Louis-Ferdinand Celine's revulsion and anger at what he considered the idiocy and hypocrisy of society explodes from nearly every page of this novel. Filled with slang and obscenities and written in raw, colloquial language, Journey to the End of the Night is a literary symphony of violence, cruelty and obscene nihilism. This book shocked most critics when it was first published in France in 1932, but quickly became a success with the reading public in Europe, and later in America where it was first published by New Directions in 1952. The story of the improbable yet convincingly described travels of the petit-bourgeois (and largely autobiographical) antihero, Bardamu, from the trenches of World War I, to the African jungle, to New York and Detroit, and finally to life as a failed doctor in Paris, takes the readers by the scruff and hurtles them toward the novel's inevitable, sad conclusion.

About this title

Review:

Céline is my Proust!--Philip Roth

The most blackly humorous and disenchanted voice in all of French literature.--John Sturrock

Teeming with disease, misanthropy, and dark comedy.

An extraordinarily gifted writer, he writes like a lunging live wire, crackling and wayward, full of hidden danger.--Alfred Kazin

Terrifying: enormously powerful and slashing, satiric, misanthropic--but what power of the imagination!--James Laughlin

One of the greatest novels of the twentieth century. It could be said that without Céline there would have been no Henry Miller, no Jack Kerouac, no Charles Bukowski.--John Banville

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

About the Author:

Louis-Ferdinand Céline (1894-1961) was a French writer and doctor whose novels are antiheroic visions of human suffering. Accused of collaboration with the Nazis, Céline 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, Céline 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.

Ralph Manheim (1907-1992) was an American translator of German and French literature, as well as occasional works from Dutch, Polish and Hungarian. The PEN/Ralph Manheim Medal for Translation, a major lifetime achievement award in the field of translation, is named in honor of Manheim and his work.

William T. Vollmann is the author of The Atlas (winner of the 1997 PEN Center West Award), Seven Dreams: A Book of North American Landscapes, and Europe Central. His nonfiction includes Rising Up and Rising Down which was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award in 2003, and his novel Europe Central won the National Book Award in 2005.

About this edition

• Publisher: New Directions
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 0811216543
• ISBN 13: 9780811216548
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 464