Customer Reviews

North (French Literature Series)

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In this partly autobiographical novel, we find Celine on the run through Baden Baden, a bombed out Berlin, and finally a small village at the outskirts of the remains of the Third Reich capital, on his way to what he hesitantly calls a refuge, during the chaos and total insanity of the final stages of the second world war.

Celine does not really complain the misery of his fate. In his cynical manner, he merely records his incredible encounters with seemingly all the renegades and twised characters of a scorched Europe and willing or not he witnesses the atrophies and deformities of human mind. Ironically, the author somehow manages to turn his characters into hillarious and amiable, even entertaining figures.

Celine writes like no other writer you have read. His truncated sentences, in bits and pieces all over the place, remind of a rather maniac mind spinning thoughts at the speed of light in an incohomprensive, bordering to delirious babble. That's Celine all right throughout North. In poignant remarks, making fun, laughing at himself, expressing same anxiety, bitternes, and cynical observations as in his other writings, Celine moves on, weary but undefeated. Life goes on.

I love all of Louis-Ferdinand Celine's novels, from "Journey to the End of the Night" to "Rigadoon", but I have to say that "North" is my favorite. It's hard to say why exactly, because his novels are mostly simlar in tone and style, except for "Journey", his first, which is his most accessible, ellipses-free novel...Bukowski (who turned me on to Celine in the first place) said that Celine went insane after his first book and didn't write much of consequence after that.
I would have to respectfully disagree. "North" certainly does read like an ultra-cynical, off-the-cuff, unruly beast, the rantings of a madman...Celine opens complaining about society, his publisher, the reading public, and his fellow authors, and seems to careen between his present-tense problems and his flight from both the Allies and the Nazis during World War 2, twenty years before, with no rhyme or reason...but I think there IS a reason: the experience. Probably a multiple-degreed Literature Professor (if he read Celine at all) could point out all sorts of latent themes and ironic stylistic touches, but I don't go in for all that...I just love running along behind Celine, trying to keep up. "North" is a whirlwind, a blast of vituperation and self-pity, the missing link between Surrealism and Punk Rock, and possibly the highest expression of what it means to be French and why so many people hate the French: if YOU were a little country crowded on all sides by beasts and fops, and everyone loved your wines and cheeses but squawked with hatred whenever you gave your opinion on something, how do you think YOU'D behave?

Perpetually running from the perils of war, Destouches finds himself acting as collaborator in WWII.. a nazi doctor, routed around in confusion, &, as always, trying simply to save his own skin. This Dalkey Archive edition comes complete with a glossary of historical references.

Forget what you've heard about him writing only two good books, read this: "...whenever they get a chance, never fear, people make you waste hours and months...they use you as a wall to bounce their bullshit off of...blah! and blah! and blahblahblah!...you put up with it for an hour, you'll need two weeks to recover...blah! blah!...hitch a thoroughbred to a plow, it'll take him a month, two months, to get back in his stride...if he ever does...the same can happen to you for trying to be nice, for listening..."

Written long after *Journey to the End of Night* and *Death on the Installment Plan* made him famous, and his alleged activities during World War II turned him into something of a pariah, *North* is a lesser known and less widely read novel, but, to my mind, in many respects, a vastly superior work to both *Journey* and *Death.* What makes it so? Precisely Celine's recounting of the questionable wartime `activities' that have turned him into one of the true black sheep of 20th century literature. What Celine has to say about the inferno of WW2 wasn't politically correct long before that term was invented to describe a particular form of lying. Is it possible that the seeds of political correctness were sown in the ashes of postwar Europe? Maybe. In any event, Celine stands firmly opposed to any form of lying or hypocrisy and he found plenty of both to rage against in the chaos of war. The problem is that Celine finds the hypocrisy, the lying, the betrayal and rot on *both* sides, in human nature itself, and this is an unacceptable position to take in the last--if not only--war that is still considered to have had a clear Good Guy and an indisputable Bad Guy.

*North* chronicles a stage in Celine's flight `north' during the last days of an imploding Third Reich. As Berlin is bombed into pebbles, and then re-bombed into dust, Celine, his wife Lili, a temperamental actor friend, and his cat, take refuge in a village along with other refugees--prisoners, traitors, SS officers, gypsies, German nobility, and assorted riff-raff on the move--and all of them scheming and jockeying for the best position to ensure their own survival. Hunger and fear bring out the worst in all of them, except, perhaps, the cat.

What Celine has the effrontery to point out is that human evil is pervasive--the rottenness is at the core, and extends from the bottom up. The guys at the top are only the biggest stinkers, the Chief Thugs, different only in their capacity to commit atrocities of all sorts, but, otherwise, identical to the rest of us in the latent human potential for unbounded cruelty. Celine take on WW2 is one where principled stands were virtually without exception conditional on one's place in the raging chaos. Can the Nazis keep me fed, alive, relatively safe? Okay, then, "Heil Hitler!" Can the Russians? "Welcome Comrade!" Maybe the English? Then "God Save the Queen!" Celine fought with the "Good Guys" during WW1 and so the edge of his ultra-cynicism was somewhat blunted, his political amorality obscured, his misanthropy still a bit of a joke, fogged over and softened by the fact that, after all, he fought on the `right' side. But his essential attitude is there even in *Journey to the End of Night.* Celine doesn't believe in *anything*--nothing, at least, larger than the survival of himself and his immediate friends. His is an ant's-eye view of the world and like all the rest of us little guys, he's just trying to keep from getting stamped on by the big boots from above. And if you think of the war itself as the shadow cast by a great big boot coming down, you can understand better the mindless, unprincipled scramble for survival that Celine dares to record in the pages of *North.* Are there no atheists in a foxhole? Well, Celine argues, there are no idealists there, either. When the bombs are screaming down, there's just a lot of desperate and terrified people looking for a rock to hide under. Justification comes later; survival is first. After all, there's nothing without survival. And wherever the Wheel of Fortune stops, that's where you stand, Nazi or Allied, collaborative or Resistance. You place your best bet: to survive is to win. Well, you might say, that Celine agrees wholeheartedly with Ecclesiastes: "A living dog is better than a dead lion."

It's this kind of radical moral complexity that I think makes *North* richer and ultimately superior to Celine's earlier work--it also fuels an even more virulent disgust with "humanity," so called, and amps up his characteristic misanthropy to the max. Everyone gets it in the neck. The black comedy is here, the antic absurdity, this is Celine after all, cracking jokes even up to his eyeballs in blood and worms. That he can turn the experiences recounted in *North* into a picaresque romp through the Apocalypse is amazing in itself--in many another author's hand, the events of *North* would be the material for a gloomy tragedy of the epic sort well-known by now among chroniclers of the WW2 horror. That Celine is able to turn this uncompromising tale of war, famine, and exile into a loony brimstone romp is a backhand tribute to the human spirit. Well, a tribute to Celine's spirit, in any event--a spirit more fully and honestly "human" than most.

Louis Ferdinand Celine was an anti-Semite and thoroughly unpleasant character (unless you were counted among his small, close circle of friends). He also happens to be one of the 20th Century's greatest writers, someone admired by the likes of Samuel Beckett (not a man known to offer unworthy praise). JOURNEY TO THE END OF THE NIGHT, DEATH ON THE INSTALLMENT PLAN and NORTH are ample evidence of Celine's enormous talent. Unflinching, vicious and literate, his prose depicts individuals living on the margins--he also is a writer of great wit and there are passages which will provoke peals of laughter from readers with the intelligence to appreciate his dry, bitter,caustic humour. Highly recommended...though not for the faint of heart and small of brain.

This is possibly Celine's most abstract and difficult novel, but well worth the effort. If you persist, you will be rewarded with a tragic story that rivals the bards of ancient greece in its beauty and chaotic symmetry.

Celine never really bothers to make grand pronouncements about the future, about civilization, about humanity, about the future. If he makes them, they are predicated on madness and miscommunication, and often meant merely as a foil for his real ideas. Yet I'm convinced that behind the rants, raves, and scattered events in this novel is a grand metaphor for the fall of the Enlightenment ideas that defined the 18th, 19th, and early 20th century. Gone is any real perception of right or wrong, of good or bad, of the necessary past and the rational future...all we have left is the self and the other, struggling through a bombed-out landscape as Western Continental Europe finally crashes headlong into the ground. Humanity has returned to its irrational origins, and not even an 80 year old Prussian Junker in his underpants can get on his horse, draw his saber, and make everything all right again...

A vital description of the effects of World War II on the ideas, formulations, and traditions of Western European society, and a fantastic read to boot.

This one will stay with us for a long time.

The only novels I've ever read that are better are "Huckleberry Finn" and Celine's "Death on the Installment Plan." This book is far better than "Journey to the End of Night" and slightly more endearing than "Castle to Castle." A masterpiece of "social criticism," set against the dying days of Nazi Germany, but applicable to anywhere, any time. Read only the Manheim translation.

This novel about Celine's ordeal under nazi germany is a hyperhectic account about his travails & sacrifices dealing with people & places which are no better off than him.What is striking & humorous about this frenetic narrative is how he is able to bring a whole world war & its inhabitants into his hands & unloads them into a style & survivalist frame of mind that is entirely his own.Though not containing the depth & numerous brilliance of journey & death,what this novel has is the consistency that leads to a rough & jumpy ride all the way through.The beginning may be stiff,but it loosens to economic brilliance shortly afterwards.

Immediately the reader is swept away in a cascading avalanche of thought driven by the sight of the end of a world that was slowly sinking into insanity. Nazi Germany, the allied bombings, and the constant struggle to survive one more minute in a village where life was determined by food rations and an out of control Gestapo. The book pulses with such energy making it hard to put down. Simply mind opening to a unique literary style

North is the second book in the "trilogy" that begins with "Castle to Castle" and ends with "Rigadoon"...again, Celine tells us a fascinating story of all the people forming a train of endless death after World War 2...