synopsis:

First published in 1932, 'Journey to the End of the Night' is regarded as Céline's masterpiece. It is told in the first person by céline's alter-ego ferdinand bardamu and is based on his 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. The novel gives a picture of those years as seen by an underdog.

Céline is very much the product of his age and was particularly marked - like so may other writers - by the senseless carnage of the First World War.

Céline's disgust with human folly, malice, greed and the mess that man has made of society and of his own environment lies behind the bitterness and bile that distinguishes his writing and gives it its force. This is exemplified in the superb portraits of mainly ordinary human beings coping with their lives as best they can; caught in poverty or their obsessions - hindered from evading traps of their own making by ignorance and prejudice.

on this book:

this book is seen as probably the greatest work of nihilism ever. The engine of Céline's disgust is an irrational misanthropy. It is irrational because contradictory: those he scourges he later pities; those he helps he comes to despise. In Ferdinand's despair at what industrialisation and incipient democracy have done to the contemporary soul, we are reminded of the anguish of Nietzsche's raging free spirit Zarathustra (see thus spoke zarathustra). Ferdinand, like Zarathustra, rails against the instincts of mass man and of the herd, then crowns himself with laughter.

Céline immerses the reader in a torrential flow of language - fragmented, coarse, street poetic, blackly comic, and full of neologisms and ellipses. He writes of suffering, debased lives and poverty with reckless abandon. His vision of humanity in thrall to its own weakness is utterly cynical. He leads his characters - Robinson, a romantic wanderer, conscripted soldiers, abused prostitutes - to the edge of the abyss, then pushes them oven As they fall we hear only the sad echo of their voices - and Céline's wild laughter.