Customer Reviews

Death on the Installment Plan

5 star:		(28)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

'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.

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."

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.

I'm not sure if you're supposed to read this book or Journey to the End of the Night first, I have a feeling that one is a continuation of the other but it doesn't really seem to make any kind of difference. The other book I think might be more of Ferdinand's experiences in the war and as a doctor, while this book deals more with his childhood. It can get confusing actually because the story starts off with Ferdinand as an adult and then without warning switches over to his childhood. The novel then mostly follows his growing up and the various stages of his life, growing up kind of poor in Paris, then going to England for schooling and finally being apprenticed to this quasi-crazy inventor/balloon operator/con artist fellow. This is a funny book but not a happy book, both disdain and love for humanity crackle off the pages and Celine's prose is blunt in its eloquence. His style is bracing today and must have seemed bizarre back when the book was first published, having had most of a century of post-modern writing his techniques don't seem as off-putting as they must have originally but his constant use of ellipses is actually a crucial part of the novel. I think earlier translation had taken them out but they need to be here because they set the pace for the reader, forcing you to pause right when he wants to (Pynchon did the same thing in Gravity's Rainbow and I wouldn't be surprised if this novel gave him the idea) and giving the sentences a broken, staccato feel, somewhere between a crazy man ranting at you and a very intense friend sitting across the table from you telling you exactly how it is and how it's going to be. It doesn't hurt that Celine holds nothing back, his feelings are poured out onto the paper, at no point do you really have to ask, "So tell me, how do you really feel?" because it's all there. He rages at life, at people, at the world in general in the most excoriating language that the printed page can hold, no swearword is left unspoken, no coarse description left untouched. Everyone in the world hates him and he hates them back, the words coming in clusters, like he's spitting them out through clenched teeth. The situations range from being darkly depressing to darkly hilarious (sometimes both, especially in the scene where one character offs himself) and there sure isn't a lot of hugging going on but Celine is being so honest about the human condition that you don't really mind. And when he goes to get poetic, he manages to take the blunt language and turn it into something grand, a ragged plea for things to not be the way they are. No matter how terrible things get for Ferdinand, no matter what life piles on top of him, he forges onward anyway, spitting and screaming but he never gives up and he never slows down, using the words as a scythe to cut his way through it all. By turns tragic and comic, bawdy and touching, blunt and subtle, it's a big book and a lot to slog through but reading it in small chunks so as to absorb it better is probably the best way to go about it. Not for the faint of heart but those willing to dive into it will find that the rewards are pretty decent.

This is, quite simply, the best novel I've ever read (and I've read quite a few). At times hilarious, at other times poignant to the point of inducing tears, this book is a roller-coaster ride through the range of human emotions, human foibles, human triumphs. There's more insight on every page here than in most full novels. Far better than "Journey to the End of Night." A masterpiece. (Read ONLY the Manheim translation.)

The greatest novel of one of the greatest novelists of all time.

You would have to write a book longer than Celine's novel to do any justice to analyzing it. Thus I was shocked to find the Wikipedia article about this book was about five sentences long. I dropped what I was doing and spouted off a slightly-edited paragraph about the themes of the novel. It's a flawed and cursory view of a book that is difficult to put into words, but I'll offer it here.

"It offers a profound vision of the nature of individual human existence: rooted in loneliness, pettiness, and inertia. The antiheroic genius of Bardamu's search for a livable life in early 20th century Paris forms a direct literary metaphor for modern humanity: to search and search again for happiness and meaning in a complex world and to oftentimes come up empty. Or more precisely: to find words, stories, experiences, and ideas that stretch the boundaries of consciousness while providing little or no structure with which to assign any meaning to life as a whole. Life becomes merely a subjective personal experience in the midst of madness and savagery: beautiful in itself but with overtones of profound suffering and a lack of moral prerogatives, and at the mercy of the strange human forces that are both within and without. We become our own history, and our own suffering, and as as such we live: accumulating the pain, happiness, confusion, and death that life allows us to have on installment. Even if it will all be repossessed at the end, when it becomes less than a dream. And that is a moment we all live for."

The modern world belongs to Celine. As it more closely conforms to his vision of a future with little hope, a past with veiled lies and atrocities, and an incredible yet painful and ephemeral present, we see that his vision has only become stronger when referring to the world beyond his immediate comprehension or even prediction.

This is a fascinating work of art by a writer at the height of his powers. It belongs on the bookshelf of anyone who has ever cared about the realities of human existence.

Everyone who is something in the 20th century writing, has crawled from
under the master's long overcoat (from Queneau to Thomas Bernhard). This
book, his greatest opus, still dazzles, towering in its Olympian altitudes.
The most hillarious, uproarious book ever written. Yet as brittle and tragic
as anything out of Euripides or Aeschylus.

Really there is very little to say other than I read it every couple of years and still find other fiction wanting compared to it. Apparently it is not read that often in France because the Argot has become obscure. Manheim's translation is superlative and this is reflected in the amount of writers I have heard cite him as a major influence. Underneath all his mis- this and anti-that is novel full of deep understanding, forgiveness and love of humanity.

"Death On the Installment Plan" is often sadly cast in the shadow of Celine's first, and most famous book, "Journey to the End of the Night." But where "Journey" took us into the depths of society, "Death" takes us into a more individual heart. Here we find more auto-bio text, this time concerning Celine's childhood, but as with "Journey" it is assumable that much of this was symbolic. Celine's descriptions of his family, his schooling, his brief career in jewelry sales, and his appreticeship for a mad genius are all so eloquently written as to bring tears. Each character is full and rich, and each motive is perfectly carried out. Superbly essential reading for anyone interested in what makes humans tick

I did not like this book much. I even hate it, and probably would not read it again.

But I admit it. I laughed at some of the quirky passages and occurrences, but not at the book itself. DoIP is very vitriolic and vituperative; it is very caustic and corrosive. Beneath its acerbic nature and dark humor, though, lies a very pertinent reflection of the lower depths of reality and man. And although Celine was not one who you would call positive, his book still has that glint of idealism, that belief of happiness, that belief in the virtues that some men possess. Amidst the score of idiots and devils in the novel are some people trying to be scrupulous and generally good even while wallowing in the maw of evil surrounding them.

DoIP is Ferdinand's bildungsroman, a story of his development, and of his persistence to live amidst a brew of difficulties
pervading in his life. Of course he has degraded morally, emotionally, mentally and spiritually in the course of the novel;
but what would you have expected with his circumstances? In the end, though,we see that he is just a child trying to live in
the reality of the world, in pain and in suffering. Yet amidst this he manages to persist, to live, and this is what
ultimately Celine tries to preach in his novel (as I have seen it): that one should persist amidst the difficulties, that one
should live amidst the pain entrenching them, that one should live amidst everything.

This may be a dark book, but it has something that light-hearted books could probably never portray: the truth.