Journey to the End of the Night - Softcover

Louis-Ferdinand Céline

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0811200191 ISBN 13: 9780811200196

Publisher: New Directions Publishing Corporation, 1983

Synopsis

Told in the first person, the novel is based on the author's own experiences during the First World War, in French colonial Africa, in the USA - where he worked for a while at the Ford factory in Detroit - and later as a young doctor in a working-class suburb in Paris. Celine's disgust with human folly, malice, greed and the chaotic state in which man has left society lies behind the bitterness that distinguishes his idiosyncratic, colloquial and visionary writing and gives it its force.

About this title

Review:

When it was published in 1932, this then-shocking and revolutionary first fiction redefined the art of the novel with its black humor, its nihilism, and its irreverent, explosive writing style, and made Louis-Ferdinand Celine one of France's--and literature's--most important 20th-Century writers. The picaresque adventures of Bardamu, the sarcastic and brilliant antihero of Journey to the End of the Night move from the battlefields of World War I (complete with buffoonish officers and cowardly soldiers), to French West Africa, the United States, and back to France in a style of prose that's lyrical, hallucinatory, and hilariously scathing toward nearly everybody and everything. Yet, beneath it all one can detect a gentle core of idealism.

About the Author:

Louis-Ferdinand Celine (1894 - 1961) was one of the most controversial novelists of the twentieth century, a writer who mixed realism with imaginative fantasy and an iconoclast who shocked many of his readers.

About this edition

• Publisher: New Directions Publishing Corporation
• Publication date: 1983
• ISBN 10: 0811200191
• ISBN 13: 9780811200196
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 509