Rigadoon [Paperback]

Louis-Ferdinand Celine (Author), Ralph Manheim (Translator), Kurt Vonnegut (Introduction)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 1, 1997

Completed right before his death in 1961, Rigadoon, the most compassionate of Céline's novels, explores the ravages of war and its aftermath.

Often comic and always angry, the first-person autobiographical narrator, with his wife and their cat in tow, takes the reader with him on his flight from Paris to Denmark after finding himself on the losing side of World War II. The train rides that encompass the novel are filled with madness and mercy, as Céline, a physician, aids refugees while ignoring his own medical needs.

Céline's inventive style and black humor profoundly influenced many writers who came after him, including Kurt Vonnegut, Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg and Charles Bukowski. As Kurt Vonnegut states in his introduction to this edition, "[Céline] demonstrated that perhaps half of all experience, the animal half, had been concealed by good manners. No honest writer or speaker will ever want to be polite again."

Editorial Reviews

Review

Céline quite deliberately makes us feel the inescapable, mind-rotting horror of endless chaos, the fact of war as Americans have never known it. (Washington Post Book World )

Céline's explosive language and style is the very sign of his experience: its full impact explodes, as if by delayed reaction, before the eyes, and in the consciousness, of author, narrator, and reader alike. (Times Literary Supplement )

Lit with a flash of frighteningly lucid prophecy, and seen to be nothing less than the doom of the human race. . . . But what is oddest of all about Rigadoon, and what distinguishes it from Céline's other work, is its sense of peace, almost of consummation, at the sight of a Europe in rubble and flames. (The New York Times Book Review )

More than most modern authors, [Céline is] able to plunge directly into the burning center, where Europe, in rage and anguish, is tearing itself apart. In so doing, he captures the heat and energy of he final holocaust better than almost anyone. (The Nation )

Manheim’s translation succeeds in capturing the powerful immediacy of Céline’s prose. (Library Journal )

Language Notes

Text: English (translation)
Original Language: French

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Product Details

• Paperback: 296 pages
• Publisher: Dalkey Archive (November 1, 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1564781623
• ISBN-13: 978-1564781628
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.5 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #167,130 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

18 of 25 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Horrifying, April 7, 2001

By 

[e-mail] (Edmonton, Alberta Canada) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Rigadoon (Paperback)

Louis Ferdinand Celine was one of the greatest novelists of the twentieth century. Louis Ferdinand Celine was a caring doctor and a man with a deep vein of compassion. Louis Ferdinand Celine was an almost insanely vicious racist and anti-semite, calling for the extermination of the Jews in three infamous and untranslated pamphlets and raving about miscegenation and the coming extinction of the white race. These are all facts and trying to explain the contradictions between them deserves a lot more attention than has so far been given.

In the meantime, read Rigadoon. It is not in a class with Journey to the End of Night or Death on the Installment Plan, since its focus is narrower. Celine's racism is more clearly in evidence, and even admirers will find the first thirty pages or so very trying. Celine was not a collaborator, at least not in a legal sense, but on hearing him rave about race suicide or hurling abuse at the resistance, who understandably hated him, one thinks that he should have been grateful he wasn't shot. After that, we get to the novel proper, which is a lightly fictionalized version of the last months of the war. Time, and much else is rather hallucinatory. At one point, Celine says it is May, at another point he is told about Rommel's funeral, which would have been eight months or so earlier. Rigadoon consists of his nightmarish account of Celine's ultimately successful attempt to flee, with his wife and cat, from Germany into Denmark as the war ends. As he is doing so Germany is being systematically pounded into rubble and Celine provides some horrifying passages about painfully slow trains that could be doused at any minute with phosphorous. At one point Celine suffers from a concussion. Along the way Celine and his party meet 17 mentally retarded children, and despite much abuse of these pathetic children, Celine manages to see them safely into Denmark. It is rather revealing though that he never mentions that the Nazis tried to slaughter precisely these children. Through it all we see the trademark Celine style, the famously obscene vernacular, the pages dotted with ellipses, a style which looks so easy, and yet Celine worked so hard on. Obviously, this is a novel which should be better known.

7 of 32 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Great Book, August 15, 1999

By 

[e-mail] (Moline, Il) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Rigadoon (Paperback)

This is one of the best books I have ever read go out and buy it now