Name: Journey to the end of the night
ISBN: 9780811216548

Louis-Ferdinand Céline

Journey to the end of the night

Aisha Mugo

Men are things to be afraid of, always, men and nothing else. 

In the European cold, under grey, puritanical northern skies we seldom get to see our brothers' festering cruelty except in times of carnage, but when roused by the foul fevers of the tropics, their rottenness rises to the surface.

When it was published in 1932, this 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.

Journey to the End of the Night

Not my usual read but it was well worth it. An auto-fictional recount of Celine’s life, from war to the early days of colonialism in West Africa, to the new frontier of America. Generally a great recollection of experience. Some sections did drag, particularly the end once back in France as a practicing doctor, it felt like he was trying to fill up the pages. 

The most interesting section was his time in Africa, while short, it showed the exploitative nature of colonialism, the racism & subjugation of locals & sheer physical brutality of the time. Colonialists running amuck doing whatever they wanted to whoever they wanted. 

Not my usual read but it was well worth it. An auto-fictional recount of Celine’s life, from war to the early days of colonialism in West Africa, to the new frontier of America. Generally a great recollection of experience. Some sections did drag, particularly the end once back in France as a practicing doctor, it felt like he was trying to fill up the pages. 

The most interesting section was his time in Africa, while short, it showed the exploitative nature of colonialism, the racism & subjugation of locals & sheer physical brutality of the time. Colonialists running amuck doing whatever they wanted to whoever they wanted. 



Voyage au bout de la nuit

Chef d'oeuvre dégoulinant de pessimisme et de personnages si détestables que ça en devient poétique. 

Je mets 3 étoiles pour la lecture difficile (le style de Céline est parfois écoeurant) et ses leçons de vie discutables.

Victor

Chef d'oeuvre dégoulinant de pessimisme et de personnages si détestables que ça en devient poétique. 

Je mets 3 étoiles pour la lecture difficile (le style de Céline est parfois écoeurant) et ses leçons de vie discutables.

First published in 1932, Journey to the End of the Night was immediately acclaimed as a masterpiece and a turning point in French literature. This edition contains a foreword by John Banville. 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.

Fraser Simons

What if Tyler Durden was born so long ago he joined the war and when he was shot at ran off with someone, then just kinda messed around for a while, aiming vitriol at pretty much every social construct and type of human relationship. It’s very good at inciting emotion and has decent prose work, so it’s not a one star book, but it’s reads very juvenile and like they prayed to a moral relativism text all day before writing, or something. 

I can see why it resonated with some people, especially the catch-22 crowd, a book I thought similarly was geared towards budding, lost boys growing into men that feel like everything’s a joke and they’re so hard done by. Essentially, it’s satire that’s ironic because it doesn’t know, or care, how solipsistic it is. Great for confirming motivated thinking of the same, and getting the blood up, but truly well and vapid when actually dissected. Holden Caulfield in an old man but meant to be liked and even revered, apparently, if reviews are to be believed. 

It’s not self aware enough to realize the real joke is on this actual work as a whole. Most people grow up and are aware of privilege and occupy the same world, but not this one. As with many satires I’m finding the authors tend to show their whole ass and think they’re very, very clever while doing so. All I see is an ass. Sorry.

Sabine Delorme

Kann man, darf man, soll man über ein Buch schreiben, das man nicht zu Ende gelesen hat? Das ich trotzdem wahnsinnig gut fand, aber – ich kann das nicht zu Ende lesen ohne mir umgehend Antidepressiva verschreiben zu lassen. Dieses Buch ist so kontrovers, wie fast kein anderes, das ich jemals gelesen habe.

Zuerst einmal der Autor. Céline ist bekanntermaßen Jahre nach der Veröffentlichung dieses Buches zu einem ausgesprochenen Faschisten geworden, er hat mit den Nazis kollaboriert hat nach 1937 einen so wahnsinnigen Hass auf die Juden entwickelt, dass man wohl durchaus von einer Psychose sprechen kann. Kann man, soll man so ein Buch lesen und gar stellenweise für großartig halten? Es fällt mir so schwierig Buch und Autor voneinander zu trennen, auch wenn in der Reise ans Ende der Nacht von seinem Judenhass noch nicht übermässig viel zu spüren ist.

Die komplette Rezension findet ihr hier: http://bingereader.org/2014/06/23/rei...

Emily Perkovich

I had a really hard time rating this. The language was beautiful and poetic, but the actual story was so long winded at times. Occasionally I found myself thinking more about the words themselves than what they meant all strung together.

Journey to the end of the night

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