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Drawing on a wealth of unpublished letters and documents and first-ever interviews with Celine's widow, Frederic Vitoux brilliantly weaves together all the available information on Celine into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.
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.
Louis Ferdinand Celine (1894-1961) insisted that he wrote only to earn money and professed incomprehension of how his words might injure others, yet his frenetic novel Journey to the End of Night , a gloss on the vileness of humanity, influenced a generation, while his anti-Semitic and racist tracts fueled Nazi hatred. In a psychologizing, often florid biography, French scholar Vitoux argues that young Louis's change of wet nurses and constant movement in childhood sowed the seeds of instability. The book provides a stunning portrait of Celine's progressive withdrawal from reality, accompanied by persecution manias, constant headaches and auditory hallucinations. Vitoux limns a prophet of decadence who hated war and colonialism and rattled the complacency of the well-to-do by proposing that cruel egoism dwells in the heart of every individual. Photos.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.
This well-documented, densely written, copiously footnoted biography follows Louis Ferdinand Destouches--Celine--from his birth to lower-middle-class parents in Courebevoie in 1894 through his days as a practicing physician and his imprisonment in Denmark at the end of World War II for alleged Nazi sympathies stemming from his blatant anti-Semitism, to his death in 1961 from a ruptured aneurism. Vitoux quotes passages from such autobiographical novels as Journey to the End of the Night , a moral and psychological epic published in 1932, and relies on interviews with the writer's widow, Lucette, who lived with him from 1936 until his death. The translation is good, but the dry, factual text will appeal mostly to scholars of 20th-century French literature.
- Bob Ivey, Memphis State Univ., Tenn.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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