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Journey to the End of the Night

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For the uninitiated, Journey to the End of the Night is a 450-page chronicle of anger, bitterness, hopelessness, despair, disillusionment, and resignation. It is one of the most pessimistic, negative books ever written. It addresses almost every base and negative aspect of the human experience: warfare, cowardice, lies, corruption, betrayal, slavery, manipulation, exploitation, perversion, persecution, cheating, greed, sickness, loneliness, madness, lust, gossip, abortion, disease, vengeance, and murder. In a book that explodes with adjectives, there is hardly a cheerful word to be found.

But don't let that stop you from reading it. It is also a weird and wonderfully written mix of prose, philosophy, rant, and slang. At times it is hilarious. It is also sad, moving, and deeply insightful. Celine's voice is unique, and his dark vision changed the face of twentieth century literature.

True to its title, the book is a metaphorical journey into the dark side of humanity. It doesn't really have a plot. In a nutshell, it follows Ferdinand Bardamu (who is telling the story), who joins the army on a whim, entering World War I. The fear and madness of his war experiences leave him shell-shocked. He spends the remainder of the war convalescing in a hospital, where he spends his time avoiding the front, laying nurses, and pulling himself together. After the war, he yearns to escape, so he travels to the French African colonies to run a trading post deep in the jungle. There, he contracts malaria and is sold into slavery by a Portuguese priest, only to be dumped in a quarantine facility in New York.

He eventually winds up in Detroit, where he works a dead-end factory job at Ford and falls in love with a prostitute. Restless, he leaves his love behind and returns to France. There he completes his medical studies, and begins a practice in a Paris slum. After enduring abject poverty for several years, he leaves his practice in disgust; eventually he winds up working in a private mental hospital in Paris.

Throughout the story, and at each major stop of his journey, Ferdinand encounters Robinson, a fellow traveler and nihilist. As the book progresses, Robinson lures the unwilling Ferdinand into a series of misadventures, taking him deeper and deeper "into the night."

I first read this book about 15 years go, in my mid-twenties. I had a stultifying corporate job, and I thought the next 40 years of my life were going to be nothing but empty and meaningless drudgery. In short, I thought my life was already over. So when I first read Journey, I was immediately hooked. It perfectly voiced all of the loathing and emptiness I was feeling. And sadly, it reinforced every dark, evil, vile thought I had about life and humanity. In retrospect, I realize it inspired and fueled my depression, which dogged me for another two and a half years.

I finally scraped up the courage to make some changes in my life, and my own "night" faded into daylight. And for the most part, the darkness has stayed away. So years later, it is with very different eyes that I finished reading Journey for the second time.

So how was it the second time around? How has this poisoned wine aged? It has aged beautifully. It is a tremendous book, and I still love it. Celine perfectly voices the world-weariness and despair that accompany hopelessness. And he captures the restless urge to escape when there is no meaning in your life. It wasn't as funny as I remembered, but it seemed more insightful, more devastating, and even more sweeping in it vast range of observations.

I also found it slowly pulling me back into my own dark place--but only momentarily. With a bit of effort I was able to keep things in check. But it's good to look back now and again, to remember where you came from and how you've grown. Celine's world is a sad, bitter, and lonely place. But it's a place we all visit from time to time. Sadly, some are trapped there, never ending their grim journey. Read this book and enter their world.

Celine was a WWI veteran, sometimes discontented vagabond, and qualified but barely surviving Doctor/Physician who wrote one of the greatest novels of the 20th Western century. This is it. It's like a bomb hitting you on every page. The level of pessimism, cynicism, black humor, and its concomitant in the bargain--unflinching honesty--had never been equaled before in literature & few have matched it since. By his example, he inspired Henry Miller, Philip Roth, Jean-Paul Sartre, Jack Kerouac & many other luminaries to write in a similar no-holds-barred style. But as they say, the original is always the best & Celine was an original. No less a literary master and 'black satirist' than Nabokov himself has called Celine nothing but a second-rater; but even if you agree with that assesment of Celine's purely literary skills, you have to give credit to the guy for originating the no-nonsense style which made possible an artistically illuminating foray of unprecedented brutal honesty into the seedier aspects of life.

During the second World War, Celine wrote and distributed anti-semitic pamphlets and was ardently pro-Nazi and pro-German occupation of France. A lot of people couldn't understand how such an indisputably important artist could also be a Fascist sympathizer. Fascism & art didn't go together in their minds (especially since most of the literati in France who had liked Celine's novels were either strong lefists and/or pro-USSR Communists). Celine had to live in exile for many years as a result of this war-time pro-fascist business, and never regained the scary perfection of form, the shattering style evident on every page of "Journey" (and its less impressive but still amazing follow-up "Death On the Installment Plan").

There's very little in "Journey" that's scatologically trite & meandering, ... this is strong, even poetic stuff--some of the most original prose ever written. At this point in his career Celine's writing was an absolute revelation to most people who read it, and it was equally popular with low-brow and high-brow readers alike. Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir used to know entire passages of "JTTEOTN" by heart and quoted from it often to spice up conversations that were getting too uptight.

Some people swear by the newer Mannheim translations as the absolute best, but I for one, found them a little too willing to please 'hip' American audiences by using certain more popular forms of speech, at the expense of a stronger but more restrictively high-brow literary quality. That's why I say, read the Manheim versions but don't ignore the older translations available in the libraries , some of them are brilliant and turn Celine into a much more refined writer than Manheim, even if the curse words are toned down and euphemised. Of course, most French people will tell you that it's absolutely ridiculous to read Celine in anything but French!

I do not see Ralph Manheim's new translation of Celine's ''Journey to the End of the Night'' (New Directions) as an improvement over John H.P. Marks's fine 1934 version, I see it as more of a refinement of the times, read both of them if you can. It is good to see Celine being brought back to the public's attention. For all his paranoia and the questions raised by the anti-Semitic pamphlets he wrote at the time of World War II, Celine remains one of the great European novelists of the century, the only logical successor, one might say, to Dostoyevsky. This is a powerful book not for the weak at heart, it is damaging to all your senses and engulfs you in a wonderful passion for true, great literature.

In 1932, with ''Journey to the End of the Night,'' Celine snatched French fiction from the manicured hands of Gide and Proust and gave it an elementary gusto, a savage bite it had hardly known since Rabelais. Four years later, with ''Death on the Installment Plan,'' he had already snarled and elbowed his way into the pantheon.

''Journey'' is a picaresque novel whose protagonist fights in World War I, works in Africa, travels to the United States and returns to Paris to become a doctor. An impoverished doctor in a Paris slum like his antihero Ferdinand, Celine clearly announced his position when he wrote this fantastic book, he was "against all". While Cervantes, the other great picaresque novelist, mourned the death of chivalry, Celine's subject was the death of civility. As a slum doctor, he had heard every kind of cry of pain, anger and dispair; you can find them all in his novels, mixed with his own archetypally French humor and transmogrified by a style of exalted disgust. Insisting on spoken rhythms, Celine said that he wanted to have his language ''throb more than reason", he called his style of writing the "music in his head".

There's a passage in Nietzsche's ''Beyond Good and Evil'' that could be the best summary of Celine's qualities. He writes that ''it might be possible for a highly developed man, supposing him to degenerate and go to ruin, to acquire qualities thereby alone, for the sake of which he would have to be honored as a saint in the lower world in which he had sunk.'' And we can see Celine as the saint of all things forbidden and dark...

This book had been sitting on my bookshelf for years...somehow it had evaded me, but one night a few weeks ago I picked it up out of curiosity, bit into the first chapter and howled out loud laughing...the writing was hilarious and explosive, absurd, dark and vicious, a complicated, sometimes contradictory mixture that still feels contemporary in the 21st century. brilliant. I was immediately hooked on this book, it had waited patiently for me to discover it and now it strung out its treasures. Bardamu leads us on his journey, through terrible scenes of sadness and grotesque, suffocating comedy, occassionally opening his heart enough to reveal, despite all of his claims otherwise, a sensitive and suffering soul trying his hardest to find any meaning whatsover in his own life. Celine's prose eviscerates everything around him, as well as himself. The novel is brilliantly concluded; though the title can be interpreted as the metaphorical night that we all travel through in our lives, it's truly the end of the particularly horrific night that resides in the final pages of the book, full of nihilism and exhausted resignation, that we journey towards in reading it. And that's where Celine leaves us, alive for one more day, in the questionable dawn of the morning that swallows up the night.

Not to be a naysayer, because I know this translation has received quite a bit of critical acclaim, but Celine remains much more lucid and enjoyable in the original Marks translation, which you can probably pick up at any used book store.

I looked at a few of my favorite scenes in both books and, while Marks doesn't quite capture Celine's frenetic style, he seems to have a better sense of comic timing, and has a wonderful sense of the rhythm of the book's language. While it may not be as faithful as the Manheim, all in all, it makes for a better read.

The book itself is wonderful. I discovered this book by way of Catch-22, because Heller said this Celine was one of his major influences, and found that Journey to the End of the Night was actually a more rewarding read (if a little less funny) than Catch-22. It not only encapsulates most of Heller's ideas about sanity and war, but expands into much richer territory.

Also, a little too much has been made of the constant pessimism of the book. It isn't as soul crushing as one might think, and isn't the sort of facile hipster cynicism that a lot of books settle for. Scratch the surface of a pessimist and you'll find a disillusioned optimist. There is a strong undercurrent of humanity in this book, which I didn't always find in Catch-22. I realized this as soon as I came across the character of Alcide, who is living his "wretched life in this tropical monotony...for a little girl who was vaguely related to him, without conditions, without bargaining, with no interest except that of his own good heart."

Although the bitterness in this book can sometimes be grating, it is never nasty, stupid, all-encompassing bitterness. The only problem is finding the pockets of hope. As Celine writes, "It wouldn't be a bad idea if there were something to distinguish good men from bad."

In George Steiner's novella, The Portage to San Cristobel of A.H., Nazi hunters discover an aged Adolf Hitler living quietly in the Peruvian jungle. Their plan is to kill Hitler, however they offer him the chance to defend himself instead. He is defiant, reckless and taunts them. "I am an old man...You have made of me some kind of mad devil, the quintessence of evil, hell embodied. When I was, in truth, only a man of my time. Oh, inspired I grant you...with a nose for supreme political possibility. A master of human moods, perhaps, but a man of my time."

Louis-Ferdinand Destouches (Celine was a pseudonym) was, like Steiner's Hitler, certainly an inspired man of his time, perhaps terrifyingly so. Born in 1894 to a lowly Parisian family, he had a brutal childhood. Poor, dysfunctional, but recklessly ambitious, he longed to escape all that constrained him. He eventually found a release of sorts through the study of medicine and, after patriotically enlisting, in the trenches of the western front. He was seriously wounded and later decorated.

Celine's revulsion against his wartime experiences infused his debut, Journey to the End of Night (1934), perhaps the greatest work of nihilism, as well as one of the finest novels, of the century. The first hundred pages or so contain descriptions of the absurd carnage of war that few works, not even Erich Maria Remarque's, All Quiet on the Western Front, have matched. After the war, Celine qualified as a physician and traveled in French and Belgian colonial Africa before returning to work as a doctor among the urban poor of Paris.

Celine draws freely from his bank of experiences in Journey to the End of Night; the adventures of the hero-narrator, Fedinand Bardamu, mimic exactly those of the author himself. He travel from the "fiery furnace" of the western front to the screaming jungles of central Africa, and from New York to the slums of Paris. The engine of Celine's disgust is an irrational misanthropy. It is irrational because it is contradictory: those he scourges, he later pities; those he helps, he comes to despise.

In Ferdinand's despair at what industrialization and incipient democracy have done to the contemporary soul, we are reminded of the anguish of Nietzsche's raging free spirit, Zarathustra. Like Zarathustra, Fedinand rails against the instincts of mass man and of the "herd," then crowns himself with laughter. For without laughter he knows he is nothing. "Death is chasing you, you've always got to hurry, and while you're looking you've got to eat, and keep away from wars. That's a lot of things to do. It's no picnic."

In this astonishing book, Celine immerses the reader in a torrential flow of language--fragmented, coarse, street poetic, blackly comic and full of neologisms and ellipses. For this reason, one can only reap the full impact of Celine when he is read in the original French. He writes of suffering, debased lives and poverty with reckless abandon. His vision of humanity in thrall to its own weakness is utterly cynical. He leads his characters--Robinson, a romantic wanderer, conscripted soldiers, abused prostitutes--to the edge of the abyss, the pushes them over. As they fall we hear only the sad echo of their voices--and Celine's wild and raucous laughter.

In George Steiner's novella, The Portage to San Cristobel of A.H., Nazi hunters discover an aged Adolf Hitler living quietly in the Peruvian jungle. Their plan is to kill Hitler, however they offer him the chance to defend himself instead. He is defiant, reckless and taunts them. "I am an old man...You have made of me some kind of mad devil, the quintessence of evil, hell embodied. When I was, in truth, only a man of my time. Oh, inspired I grant you...with a nose for supreme political possibility. A master of human moods, perhaps, but a man of my time."

Louis-Ferdinand Destouches (Celine was a pseudonym) was, like Steiner's Hitler, certainly an inspired man of his time, perhaps terrifyingly so. Born in 1894 to a lowly Parisian family, he had a brutal childhood. Poor, dysfunctional, but recklessly ambitious, he longed to escape all that constrained him. He eventually found a release of sorts through the study of medicine and, after patriotically enlisting, in the trenches of the western front. He was seriously wounded and later decorated.

Celine's revulsion against his wartime experiences infused his debut, Journey to the End of Night (1934), perhaps the greatest work of nihilism, as well as one of the finest novels, of the century. The first hundred pages or so contain descriptions of the absurd carnage of war that few works, not even Erich Maria Remarque's, All Quiet on the Western Front, have matched. After the war, Celine qualified as a physician and traveled in French and Belgian colonial Africa before returning to work as a doctor among the urban poor of Paris.

Celine draws freely from his bank of experiences in Journey to the End of Night; the adventures of the hero-narrator, Fedinand Bardamu, mimic exactly those of the author himself. He travel from the "fiery furnace" of the western front to the screaming jungles of central Africa, and from New York to the slums of Paris. The engine of Celine's disgust is an irrational misanthropy. It is irrational because it is contradictory: those he scourges, he later pities; those he helps, he comes to despise.

In Ferdinand's despair at what industrialization and incipient democracy have done to the contemporary soul, we are reminded of the anguish of Nietzsche's raging free spirit, Zarathustra. Like Zarathustra, Fedinand rails against the instincts of mass man and of the "herd," then crowns himself with laughter. For without laughter he knows he is nothing. "Death is chasing you, you've always got to hurry, and while you're looking you've got to eat, and keep away from wars. That's a lot of things to do. It's no picnic."

In this astonishing book, Celine immerses the reader in a torrential flow of language--fragmented, coarse, street poetic, blackly comic and full of neologisms and ellipses. For this reason, one can only reap the full impact of Celine when he is read in the original French. He writes of suffering, debased lives and poverty with reckless abandon. His vision of humanity in thrall to its own weakness is utterly cynical. He leads his characters--Robinson, a romantic wanderer, conscripted soldiers, abused prostitutes--to the edge of the abyss, the pushes them over. As they fall we hear only the sad echo of their voices--and Celine's wild and raucous laughter.

Young fool Bardamu, the protagonist of Journey to the End of the Night, falls in with some marching troops in Paris just for a lark, but to his horror as a gate closes behind him, he realizes he has been drafted into the French army! And this just happens to be at the start of World War I. What is a cowardly young man who doesn't want to kill anyone do? He philosophizes on being cowardly and not wanting to kill anyone! Even as his incompetent superiors (aren't military superiors always incompetent in war?) send him and his fellow soldiers out on doomed missions without adequate intelligence, strategy, troops, or supplies. This seems all toO familiar to modern times. It's up to Bardamu to find an exit from the madness. But while the war sections of this novel are at turns comedic, absurd, bloody, and tragic, we also follow the main character to Africa, New York City, and finally as he tries feebly to start a medical practice in his native France.

To me, this novel should stand right alongside the Holy Bible, Shakespeare, and the great Greek writers on the bookshelf next to your bed as a survival tool for the 21st century. It could have been written today. The insanity of war, the emptiness of modern life, the fleeting transport of love, all of these topics spoke to me as if Celine is still a living writer much in touch with current American life. The war scenes especially resonate, reflecting a leadership who at times has no clear objective as to why or how to fight a conflict which engulfed multiple countries. Celine is a divine writer, whose sentences are dictated from a higher source, wherever great wisdom comes from. This is a book for the ages!

"Journey" is generally considered to be the father of all black humor fiction. Celine's work flows onto the page not in a smooth and steady fashion, but chunky and uneven. Some of the situations the main character goes through are truly ridiculous (and semi-autobiographical)--and this is exactly what Celine was looking for.

The story itself is interesting. It tells of the journeys of a single man through war and the world it puked up afterwards.

I bought the book because so many authors noted it as one of their influences. This includes Joseph Heller, author of "Catch-22" and WWII soldier, as well as many others. Coming from a Jewish background, finding out that Celine was anti-Semitic did not change my views of the book itself. I found no hint of this in this piece of fiction.

In many cases, Celine's words on the page seem as if they're screaming at you with emotion. It's this way of conveying feelings that was so new in his works and copied now so frequently. The less you notice it, the more modern books you've read using these techniques. It's definitely a worthwhile read.

Ah, Celine, Celine, how can anyone read this book and not laugh out loud at this least 10 times a chapter? What lightning fast wit the narration possesses. Leave it to the french to spawn an inspiration that lasts thru the ages like this has. Great things to say about the hollowness of patriotism, everyday mundane existence, and even flea counting! The fact that it's so funny in the midst of all its pessimism is proof that Celine has his moments of true compassion. He understood exactly what was going on. And maybe after you're done reading this, you will, too.
A rare, and all too knowing literary treat.