Customer Reviews

Rigodon

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Celine once said he wrote to make other writers unreadable.
While this may strike one as a strange project, I would agree,
with many others, that it was largely fulfilled. Throughout his life, Celine evolved a very personal,
"jubilatoire" (sorry, my first language is French) style that
does make most of modern French authors look like zombies. "Rigodon", Celine's last book, displays a unique stylistic
density. His famous ubiquitous "!..." actually hide
ample stylistic movements of incredible precision. The English version should show how impossible it is to
translate Celine's fantastic prose.

"Journey", Celine's first book, includes unexpected borrowings form
colloquial, spoken French. A look to further works, however, shows that these borrowings were only a starting point for a unique work on
the French language. From the night of his personal experience, Celine reaches through language to ultimate elegance, light and lightness -
a transfiguration arguably difficult to translate into English.
-- Jacques P. Du Pasquier, Geneva, Switzerland
Editor of Hache,
http://www.unige.ch/hache

Completed the day before his death in 1961, Rigadoon, the mostcompassionate of Celine's novels, explores the ravages of war and its aftermath. The final entry in Celine's horrific trilogy (the preceding volumes are Castle to Castle and North) about his and his wife's flight from Vichy France through a collapsing Third Reich to Denmark, as they desperately seek to avoid punishment as Nazi collaborators. 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.... Celine quite deliberately makes us feel the inescapable, mind-rotting horror of endless chaos.... END