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Louis-Ferdinand Céline

Journey to the End of the Night Paperback – May 17, 2006

by Louis-Ferdinand Céline (Author), Ralph Manheim (Translator), William T. Vollmann (Afterword)

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Céline’s masterpiece―colloquial, polemic, hyper-realistic, boiling over with black humor

Céline’s masterpiece―colloquial, polemic, hyper realistic―boils over with bitter humor and revulsion at society’s idiocy and hypocrisy: Journey to the End of the Night is a literary symphony of cruelty and violence that hurtles through the improbable travels of the petit bourgeois (and largely autobiographical) antihero, Bardamu: from the trenches of WWI, to the African jungle, to New York, to the Ford Factory in Detroit, and finally to life in Paris as a failed doctor. Ralph Manheim’s pitch-perfect translation captures Céline’s savage energy, and a dynamic afterword by William T. Vollmann presents a fresh, furiously alive take on this astonishing novel.

Print length

464 pages
Language

English
Publisher

New Directions
Publication date

May 17, 2006
Dimensions

5.2 x 1.3 x 8 inches
ISBN-10

9780811216548
ISBN-13

978-0811216548
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Editorial Reviews

Review

"The most blackly humorous and disenchanted voice in all of French literature."
― John Sturrock, London Review of Books

"My favorite French classic has to be Journey to the End of the Night. It's an epic that takes you all around the world, but the center of the world is Paris, or Céline's delirious, slightly hallucinatory, incredibly poetic vision of it."
― Andrew Hussey, The Guardian

"This is the novel, perhaps more than any other, that inspired me to write fiction. Céline showed me that it was possible to convey things that had heretofore seemed inaccessible."
― Will Self, The New York Times Book Review

"Teeming with disease, misanthropy, and dark comedy."
― The New Yorker

"An extraordinarily gifted writer, he writes like a lunging live wire, crackling and wayward, full of hidden danger."
― Alfred Kazin

"Terrifying: enormously powerful and slashing, satiric, misanthropic―but what power of the imagination!"
― James Laughlin

"One of the greatest novels of the twentieth century. It could be said that without Céline there would have been no Henry Miller, no Jack Kerouac, no Charles Bukowski."
― John Banville

"Céline is my Proust!"
― Philip Roth

About the Author

Louis-Ferdinand Céline (1894-1961) was a French writer and doctor whose novels are antiheroic visions of human suffering. Accused of collaboration with the Nazis, Céline fled France in 1944 first to Germany and then to Denmark. Condemned by default (1950) in France to one year of imprisonment and declared a national disgrace, Céline returned to France after his pardon in 1951, where he continued to write until his death. His classic books include Journey to the End of the Night, Death on the Installment Plan, London Bridge, North, Rigadoon, Conversations with Professor Y, Castle to Castle, and Normance.

Ralph Manheim (1907-1992) was an American translator of German and French literature, as well as occasional works from Dutch, Polish and Hungarian. The PEN/Ralph Manheim Medal for Translation, a major lifetime achievement award in the field of translation, is named in honor of Manheim and his work.

William T. Vollmann is the author of The Atlas (winner of the 1997 PEN Center West Award), Seven Dreams: A Book of North American Landscapes, and Europe Central. His nonfiction includes Rising Up and Rising Down which was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award in 2003, and his novel Europe Central won the National Book Award in 2005.

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ 0811216543
Publisher ‏ : ‎ New Directions; Edition Not Stated (May 17, 2006)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 464 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 9780811216548
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0811216548
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 15 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.2 x 1.3 x 8 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #7,819 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #4 in French Literature (Books)
- #108 in Classic American Literature
- #142 in War Fiction (Books)

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medfair

First of all read Céline; the greatest writer of 2,000 years (Charles Bukowski 1969)

Reviewed in the United States on January 13, 2019

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"First of all read Céline; the greatest writer of 2,000 years" (Charles Bukowski 1969). The book describes the life of Bardamu (evidently Celine's alter ego), a cynical, estranged, indifferent yet sensitive and easily bruised young man. Bardamu is introduced on the eve of WWI when he volunteers and is cast into the charnel house of the inhuman nightmare of that war. He is wounded, spends more than a year recuperating from his wound and shell shock, deserts, and continues his life journey through French colonial Africa, America, and France again. Like Celine himself, Bardamu becomes a physician, his career following hanging his shingle in the miserable and poor Paris quarter and eventually becoming a nolens-volens director of a psychiatric sanitarium for the bigoted rich outside Paris.
Reading 'The Journey to the End of the Night' is a literary and emotional experience. Stylistically it has the immediate shocking effect of profane, chaotic, and almost manic prose with insightful psychological observations. For example, his description of the increasingly violent fight between Robinson and his lover, Madelon, is a masterpiece in its genre. He is still considered as one of the most influential literary stylist of the 20th century. There is host of great novelists that owe him their style, including Mailer, Miller, Vonnegut, Keruac, and many others.
From the social-human angle, Celine is again a master in describing the depressive character of humanity and of human fate. His protagonists are bigoted, avaricious, indifferent to all suffering, manipulative, and mainly nauseated with life that has no meaning. His loves are reduced to indifferently bestial sex, his friendships to temporary respites from boredom, his lusts tempered by apathy and distaste. His view of humanity is as sharp and focused as that of Camus or Sartre, but instead of attempting to see the saving graces of human character he only sees the one-way descent into the end of the night.
Celine's reputation was tarnished by his later adherence to the Nazi philosophy and his increasingly rabid antisemitism. It is pretty clear that anybody with humanistic outlook should shun Celine as a person. Yet, one cannot deny him greatness as a writer.

33 people found this helpful

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Busy Reader: Get To The Point

The most beautiful book I've read, but not for everyone

Reviewed in the United States on April 28, 2018

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Someone said this is a book for young people, and I think that is true. Celine's writing appeals to those who have little confidence, who are afraid of the world, afraid of failure. His protagonist models a way of dealing with failure and defeat. He doesn't scheme to overcome the scary forces arrayed against him. Instead, he simply walks ahead into the chaos with eyes and ears open. In opening to this imperfect world, he is able to transform tragedy into comedy.

Through observation and writing, he proves to himself that he was greater than his circumstances all along, that he never had to be afraid after all. Celine takes up the garbage strewn about by a ridiculous, meaningless plot line and weaves gold out of it. Here is an example, a scene where Ferdinand acts decisively (a near unique occurrence), to leave his prostitute lover Molly in America and return to France:

“'You’re already far away, Ferdinand. You’re doing exactly what you want, aren’t you? That’s the main thing. It’s the only thing that counts …'

The train pulled in. I wasn’t so sure of my plans once I saw the engine. I kissed Molly with all the spirit I had left … I was sad for once, really sad, for everybody, for myself, for her, for everybody.

Maybe that’s what we look for all our lives, the worst possible grief, to make us truly ourselves before we die."

Similar gems appear on every page of the book. It's not for everyone, I admit. Celine's writing reminds me of sad country music. It inspires me with its sadness. If you're discouraged or disappointed with yourself, reading Celine can reassure you. "Well this apparently worthless man opened up to his worthless circumstances and made something beautiful with them. If he can, maybe I can. I don't have to win, just stay awake and accept whatever life gives me."

24 people found this helpful

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JohnL

Bizarre but enjoyable

Reviewed in the United States on April 22, 2015

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This is a review of the Kindle edition of the English language version ...
Voyage au bout de la nuit was originally published in 1932, As a first novel, it was quite successful, and has remained something of a lurking classic. It is loosely auto-biographical. The story runs through Céline's traumatic experiences of WW1, through mostly miserable experiences in tropical Africa and the USA and back to France, where the author-narrator becomes a financially unsuccessful medical doctor in Paris. His style is sometimes choppy, jumping from scene to scene, highly vernacular and often makes use of gross exaggeration. There is a lot of slang - somewhat different from that of today - and I bought this English version to help me through reading the French original. I am a reasonable speaker of French, but there is so much "argot" and unusual colourful expression in this book that there are many passages which I found difficult. Thus I have been able to compare this translation with the original as I go along. It is the only translation I know, and may not be the best, but it certainly captures the flavour of the original. Mostly, the English runs close to the French, but there are many places where the translation is very free: inevitable with a work like this. In these instances, the translator has correctly gone for a view of the woods, rather than the trees. I would definitely recommend this version to anyone who either cannot or does not wish to read the original or whose French, like mine, is not quite good enough to handle it without a crib.

24 people found this helpful

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Top reviews from other countries

Richard Brown

A black comedy that excoriates humanity

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on February 6, 2017

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A French friend has loved this book all his life, worshipped it even, probably because its jaundiced view of humanity encapsulates his own, because it is mordantly, bitterly funny in its contempt of bourgeois values. But, he warned me, English versions cannot capture the essence of this book, something important is lost in translation - I'm not qualified to verify this, not being able to read French, but it may be that my mixed feelings about this book, especially the second half of it, may have something to do with this. Certainly the language and tone is pungent, savagely critical of human instincts and institutions, stronger than we are ever likely to encounter in English fiction. It should also be remembered that this book was published in 1932, at a time when literary figures and historians were ready to face up to the true horrors of the first world war, after a period of relative silence; this sets the first anti-war section of the novel in its social context.

This context included treatment of mentally ill patients, which figure largely in the novel: treatment and ideas about insanity were often ignorant and dangerous then. Dr Bardamu, the antihero of this novel, goes to Africa to escape post-war France and poverty: the experience of colonials in Africa, in a post-slavery era where the blacks were exploited in a brutal fashion, was in its way just as traumatic. Back home, poverty, disease, prostitution, alcoholism, gross living conditions worthy of a Dickens novel, was the norm for millions struggling to live in the filthy purlieus of cities and towns. The novel is very much of its time, when the western world was on the brink of the great crash, of huge unemployment, little social security - we tend to forget its bleakness, the appalling state many people had to survive in. The social context helps to explain, at least for me, Celine's disgust with humanity, so uncompromisingly on display in this novel.

In terms of it novelistic qualities it's rather uneven. The early war section, and Bardamu's time in an assessment centre - where he might be deemed guilty of desertion and shot - are blackly comic. The flippant tone of this section rather bothered me, it seemed to undermine the very disgust and protest he was making against war and its institutions. Why turn something so serious into a burlesque? When I put this to my French friend he said, All one can do in the face of desperation is laugh. Once free of war, Bardamu travels to Africa to get as far away from Western civilisation as he can, only to find that humanity was just as squalid, corrupt and inhuman there. He encounters a post-slavery mentality and all the iniquities of colonialism; he is posted to a remote jungle outpost. Shades of Conrad's 'Heart of Darkness' here (but without its complex depth), but for Bardamu there is at least escape. To the New World. America! Ellis Island, the gateway to the land of dreams for all immigrants. Of course, it does not turn out like that. From here I increasingly began to feel that the novel loses its way; it becomes less dramatic, more domestic, deals with smaller matters; it becomes a gentler, a more conventional novel, though it still excoriates.

Bardamu gets mixed up with a no-hope character called Robinson and a group of sordid people, none of whom, to my mind, are interesting, none are seen beyond caricature. A murder is plotted, farcically goes wrong, is eventually achieved, but in this moral universe, it is merely shrugged off. Bardamu, now a practicing doctor in a poor district of Paris, after getting embroiled in many tedious domestic situation, escapes once again - he's good at running away - and ends up managing a mental health institution, where Robinson comes back to haunt him. It's all rather like Dostoevsky on a bad day. The narrative is episodic, it rambles and lacks shape, its too long, and, worst of all, it twangs on one note again and again - that humanity is utterly corrupt, rotten to the core. No subtly allowed - though there are brief moments of human goodness, kindness on the part of a prostitute, for instance, or in Bardamu's own nature, but these are like candles in the wind. The story is told relentlessly in Bardamu's voice, which is a sardonic, bitter, ironic one, full of strong epithets and denunciations. How much is this the character's voice and how much is he the mouthpiece for Celine? They blur, of course; but if you want an example of Celine's own view, read the first paragraph on page 94; there, the comic mask slips off and we have raw disgust. |It is typical of many such asides.

I have to say the latter half of the book increasingly bored me and I was glad when I finished it. But to balance the narrative shortcomings, I appreciate the distinctive, not to say unique voice of this novelist, it expresses a level of disillusionment with Western man in the early part of the 20th century - and by implication, all societies in whatever era, universally - that one seldom encounters. It's deliberately one-sided, lacks balance and proportion, is shaped by the dark times it was written in, it paints in black and white, but if you appreciate from time to time such a bracingly corrective blast against your comforting illusions, this is the novel for you.

25 people found this helpful

Crusty

Magnificent

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on November 14, 2020

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I cannot believe that I am only now reading this masterpiece at 58 years of age. Up there with Dostoyevsky, Conrad, Cervantes, Melville and all the classics. I don’t know why but writers today are all surface and no substance, despite the marketing hype.
I’m hopeless at writing reviews I agree but urge everyone to read this. There are many sequences that are truly mesmerising.

4 people found this helpful

Fidelina

Wonderful

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on July 10, 2019

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Dark and often very funny observations of life long ago. This is a wonderful book, brilliant writing, supported by a truly exquisite translation. Once again I am enthralled by the classic writer and so disappointed by the lack of equivalent contemporary authors. Celine's rather detached approach to life and other beings is quite liberating and always poignant.

5 people found this helpful

M. Lea

Outstanding

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on November 13, 2014

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This is a work of literary genius that is rightly recognised in France but often overlooked by the English-speaking world. The narrator's unrelenting pessimistic view of the true value of people and human life in general, molded from genuine experiences in WW1, colonial Africa, and living in poverty as a US immigrant & back in Paris, is a refreshing antidote to the deluded, optimistic Pollyanna nonsense that makes up 99% of literature today. In parts it's hilariously funny, in others, devastatingly sad. I cannot recommend it highly enough. As with other great books, the author may have failed to achieve these heights in his subsequent work, but please don't let that put you off reading this outstanding semi-autobiographical novel.

22 people found this helpful

Mr N D Willis

Explore the night life

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on August 19, 2013

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I must admit that I'd never heard of this book or its author before I came across it on a list of recommended reads, and I would now add my name to those recommendations. The book is expansive on terms of the years it covers, amounting to the life of the protagonist Bardamu, yet it clips along at a lively pace while maintaining the his listlessness.

The book opens with Bardamu signing up for duty in the first world war, something he quickly regrets. Appalled by the mindless slaughter, the pointlessness of the conflict and the cruelty of those in command, Bardamu's outlook is set: resigned to his fate, questioning of authority and looking for a way out.

The search for an exit brings Bardamu's first encounter with Leon Robinson, who is also looking to escape. Throughout the book Robinson and Bardamu find themselves in a number of different locations - no man's land, Paris, Africa, New York - but cannot manage to change their lot, cursing their luck and surviving just above the breadline.

Bardamu's wanderings may appear listless, but they are far from frustrating. And what appears at first to be the frustrated rants of the author's main protagonist are pointed criticisms of his contemporary society - the antipathy toward ex-servicemen, the right of the poor, colonialism, the hypocrisy of authority are all spat on to the page in fits of pique.

The ideas in the book, thus morality, attitudes toward sex and criminality and the mocking of authority - let alone the language - probably explain the fuss it created when it was published. However, the book can certainly walk the walk. Bardamu is sometimes heroic, cowardly, thoughtful, selfish, likeable, despicable but always readable.

9 people found this helpful

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Louis-Ferdinand Céline

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