Product Description

The dark side of On the Road: instead of seeking kicks, the French narrator travels the globe to find an ever deeper disgust for life.

Louis-Ferdinand Céline's revulsion and anger at what he considered the idiocy and hypocrisy of society explodes from nearly every page of this novel. Filled with slang and obscenities and written in raw, colloquial language, Journey to the End of the Night is a literary symphony of violence, cruelty and obscene nihilism. This book shocked most critics when it was first published in France in 1932, but quickly became a success with the reading public in Europe, and later in America where it was first published by New Directions in 1952. The story of the improbable yet convincingly described travels of the petit-bourgeois (and largely autobiographical) antihero, Bardamu, from the trenches of World War I, to the African jungle, to New York and Detroit, and finally to life as a failed doctor in Paris, takes the readers by the scruff and hurtles them toward the novel's inevitable, sad conclusion.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #41989 in Books
• Published on: 2006-05-26
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 464 pages

Amazon.com 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.

Review
The terrifying French novelist, Louis Ferdinand Céline—an enormously powerful and slashing, satiric, misanthropic writer. But what power of the imagination! -- James Laughlin, founder of New Directions

This is the novel, perhaps more than any other, that inspired me to write fiction. -- New York Times Book Review, Will Self

Language Notes
Text: English, French (translation)

Customer Reviews

travel is useful
[...] In solitude a young woman lies on her bed reading and underlining line after line by Louis-Ferdinand Céline. Like the one that begins with "Travel is useful, it exercises the imagination." The electronic letter glides idly by the currents of the Mississippi, until it reminds itself that it is charged with a responsibility and therefore must make its delivery to the other side of the country. And so the email slides pass West Virginia and New Jersey, and twists upward toward Pennsylvania and Massachusetts, passing towns with names that come straight out of an eighth-grade American history survey-book. [...] --from "Passages"

Bleak and yet hilarious
I guess like many American readers, I first became interested in Celine by way of Bukowski. It was a mistake to begin the book with expectations of similarity in terms of style or content, but I quickly warmed to this great author's totally unique voice and view of the world. The ability to combine outrageous humor with the grimmest subject matter imaginable is a rare talent, and Celine had it in spades. I'm quite sure this is one book I will be revisiting often in the future.

You Can't Ignore Genius
Celine doesn't have much good to say about the world, and is also notorious for having written 3 antisemitic pamphlets in the late 30s, but it's hard to ignore his genius. Journey To The End Of The Night was his first exploration of the dark and rancid side of humanity. Bardamu's experiences are expressionistic renderings of events in Celine's life.

From the battlefields of WWI, to the African jungle, to Detroit, and back to France, it's a journey into mankind's heart of darkness that the reader will not soon forget. Was Celine the world's greatest misanthrope? The deepest pessimist? I'm not sure, because he does find good human qualities here, although they are as rare as rain in the desert. Journey To The End Of The Night is an important novel that influenced writers as diverse as Beckett, Sartre, Genet, Henry Miller, Kerouac, Burroughs, Heller, and Vonnegut.