Celine: A Biography (European Sources) - Hardcover

Vitoux, Frederic

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1557782555 ISBN 13: 9781557782557

Publisher: Paragon House, 1992

Synopsis

Drawing on a wealth of unpublished letters and documents and first-ever interviews with Celine's widow, Frederic Vitoux brilliantly weaves together all the available information on Celine into an extraordinary portrait of Celine's temptuous life and times. Photographs.

About this title

Language Notes

Text: English (translation)
Original Language: French

From Kirkus Reviews

Sympathetic, perfectly tuned biography of France's most word- wild, controversial novelist ever, whose sins put Zola and Genet in the shade; by French C‚line-scholar Vitoux, and superbly translated by Browner. According to Vitoux, only three of C‚line's novels are now available in English: Journey to the End of the Night, Death on the Installment Plan, and Guignol's Band. C‚line (1894-1961) was a towering stylist who invented his own gutter argot. He wrote...fulminated!...blew his guts into your face!...with three little dots...smashing all grammar!...no subjects! stinking predicates!...a rich black delirium of Shakespearean belches!- -though in Journey, his first foulmouthed masterpiece, he'd not yet invented the three dots. Born to the petite bourgeoisie as Louis- Ferdinand Destouches, he suffered poor health most of his life, wrote scathingly of the stifling, gaslit Paris passageway in which he spent his youth, created a monster of his father (really a rather nice guy), was wounded in WW I, reeled from headaches and hallucinations and ever after complained of a train passing by in his left ear. C‚line, a doctor, traveled (or fled) greatly, always visiting health clinics wherever he went, especially in the US: A visit to the Ford auto plant in Dearborn produced a chapter of bilious satire in Journey. When that novel was published, Vitoux tells us, France swooned with joy and horror, and Death on the Installment Plan brought such geysers of outrage that C‚line became a paranoid victim of persecution mania and wrote two filthy anti- Semitic tracts, for which he was vilified for the rest of his life and which helped land him in prison for a year in postwar Denmark. He died having finished a horrific trilogy about WW II; its central novel, North, is now a classic. Vitoux makes few excuses for C‚line but does show that his anti-Semitism was both a mania and a literary artifice. Strong stuff. -- Copyright ©1992, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Edition details

• Publisher: Paragon House
• Publication date: 1992
• ISBN 10: 1557782555
• ISBN 13: 9781557782557
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 612