Death on the Installment Plan [Paperback]

Louis-Ferdinand Céline (Author), Ralph Manheim (Translator)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 17, 1971

Death on the Installment Plan is a companion volume to Louis-Ferinand Céline's earlier novel Journey to the End of Night.

Published in rapid succession in the middle 1930s, these two books shocked European literatue and world consciousness. Nominally fiction but more rightly called "creative confessions," they told of the author's childhood in excoriating Paris slums, of serves in the mud wastes of World War I and African jungles. Mixing unmitigated despair with Gargantuan comedy, they also created a new style, in which invective and obscenity were laced with phrases of unforgettable poetry. Céline's influence revolutionized the contemporary approach to fiction. Under a cloud for a period, his work is now acknowledged as the forerunner of today's "black humor."

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Louis-Ferdinand Celine's second novel continues the style of black humor and the delirious but immediate prose that made the author instantly famous in his native France in the aftermath of World War I. Celine's goal was to create a kind of literature that described people in honest terms, unembellished by the conventions of fiction, no matter how mean and crummy they were, and to portray them in the real language of everyday life and thought. He succeeds darkly and brilliantly in Death on the Installment Plan, yet it is also a sweet kind of book, a young boy's coming-of-age tale, struggling with his parents and looking for his own kind of personal freedom.

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.

Product Details

• Paperback: 592 pages
• Publisher: New Directions (January 17, 1971)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0811200175
• ISBN-13: 978-0811200172
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.2 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (38 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #67,366 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

45 of 49 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Celine's Finest Moment, August 19, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: Death on the Installment Plan (Paperback)

'Death On The Installment Plan' is a raging animal of a novel that eclipses even Celine's own 'Journey' (though, it must be said, not by much). Structurally it's a shambles, but the unbelievable energy behind each & every sentence is enough to propel the reader straight through the 600-odd pages. What few of the other reviews have pointed out is how gut-bustingly funny this book is. A laugh a line with Celine and no mistake...More than that, 'Death...' contains absolutely the funniest sex scene ever written, bar none. While 'Journey' is tighter and harsher and the later works are more crazily surreal, 'Death...' is the shot of pure Celine that literature needed when it was first published and which the literate world could use another dose of now. And that's no Cambridge lie.

43 of 50 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Doctor of Rage, May 16, 2000

By 

Bruce Kendall "BEK" (Southern Pines, NC) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (COMMUNITY FORUM 04)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Death on the Installment Plan (Paperback)

Dr. Destouches, Louis-Ferdinand, whatever you want to call him, this man is the essence of 20th century spleen, frenetic overkill, hyperbolic, high-velocity anathema. He covers all the bases. Nothing is sacred. Everything known to man and then some is fair game for his unhomogynized, vituperative rants. And yet it is not hatred of mankind that informs his venting, it is a weird kind of love. Dr. Destouches was actually a man who would not turn down a poor patient. He had a sincere love for his wife and for his cat. He is the preeminent 20th century answer to Swift and to Pope. He holds mankind up to ridicule. He lambasts the foibles and the rot of civilization. Yet he also displays vestiges of love and of understanding beneath the ravings. He abhors the human condition, yet strangely sympathizes with its common plight. We are all actors in a ridiculous farce. Life is indeed a tale told by an idiot, signifying nothing, but we are brother actors, victims of central-casting. There has never before been, nor will there ever again be, such energy displayed upon a page. The man had a vision of hell on earth and was never affronted by it. He was always willing to laugh in response to the pain. His is the consummate howl, the absurd grin, the "barbaric yawp."

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Better than Journey..., July 3, 2008

By 

Brad Hoevel (Saginaw) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Death on the Installment Plan (Paperback)

First, let me ask you: have you read 'Journey to the End of the Night'? If the answer is yes (and if you liked it) then my response to you is go ahead and read Death. Death is very similar to Journey, only Death takes place earlier in the life of Celine/Bardamu.

Plot (yes, there is one...kinda):
The book begins with a grown Bardamu, practicing medicine in the suburbs of Paris. Soon the action flashes back to his childhood, which is what the rest of the book is about. Like Journey, this book follows the narrator as he moves around to various destinations, including a number of apprenticeships in Paris, boarding school in England, and a farm. There are developed characters besides Bardamu; there are his parents, his uncle, and (best of all) a crazy Inventor who takes young Bardamu under his wing.

It was Bukowski who pointed me towards Celine. He praised Journey, but he said nothing about Death. Death was unavailable to me, and after I was done with Journey I tried to read Guignol's Band. I couldn't read it though due to the frequent incoherent streamofconscious rants (and perhaps because it wasn't a Manheim Translation). But then I moved and found Death on Credit (same...Credit is just the UK title, whereas it's installment plan in US), read it, and liked it even better than Journey. There are one or two short parts of surreal/hallucinatory sequences. Even those are short; 98% of the book I would describe as concrete events written coherently.

Celine has changed his style a little with his second book. Ellipses are used much more often here than they were in Journey. But I found this to work quite well, both in terms of readability, and in terms of emulating actual speech and thoughts. Also, there are no chapters in Death.

Every thing else is what you'd expect from Celine after reading Journey. The bipolar nature of the work--it will make you laugh, then twenty pages later you'll be crying. There's plenty of humor. There's plenty of sexual escapades. Plenty of other little adventures that you'll enjoy reading about.

Oh yeah...also, there is less blatant philosophizing in this book. In Journey he'd go off on a rant about how people are terrible, and how society is evil, and how he believes in nothing. Don't worry! Those themes/ideas are all present here, he just doesn't come out and say it, rather, he shows them.

So...if you've read Journey and liked it, I strongly suggest you read Death.

If you haven't read Journey to the End of the Night, I suggest reading that first. It's not completely necessary. I think that you'll enjoy this book more if you've read Journey. Journey is perhaps the more readable of the two (at least the more traditionally readable). But if you want to read this and then do Journey be my guest, let me know how it goes.