1,860 words
One of the saddest episodes in the life of Dr. Louis-Ferdinand Destouches, alias Louis-Ferdinand Céline, came right after he published his first novel in 1933.
Voyage a la bout de la nuit (Journey to the End of the Night) was a succés d’estime from the start and before long a bestseller too. Surely it would be soon made into a major motion picture.
4,239 words
Translated by Guillaume Durocher
Translator’s Note:
The following is taken from Dominique Venner’s Histoire de la Collaboration (Paris: Gérard Watelet/Pygmalion, 2000), 207-16. The title is editorial.
The premonition of decadence was strong with [the writer Alphonse de] Châteaubriant, but never reached the apocalyptic fury of a Céline, (more…)
1,282 words
“The white people invented the atom bomb, and a little later they disappeared.”
—Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Rigadon
May 27th is the 121st birthday of French writer Louis-Ferdinand Céline (real name: Louis-Ferdinand Destouches)—avant-garde novelist, propagandist, dissident, and physician. In America Céline is mainly known for his first two dark, expressionistic novels, first published in the 1930s, (more…)
876 words
Translated by Mitch Abidor
Translator’s Note:
Prior to its publication Céline shopped the manuscript of Journey to the End of the Night around to a couple of publishers. He wrote the following summary of the book to the prestigious Gallimard publishing house, (more…)
1,654 words
Translated by Greg Johnson*
Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s extraordinary “pamphlets” — Trifles for a Massacre, The School for Cadavers, A Fine Mess — may have caused many admirers to forget that our recently-minted prophet first surfaced in the literary world as a novelist. It seems to me that Journey to the End of the Night — illustrious though it may be, and as unforgettable as the arrival of a cyclone — is still neglected in accounting for the makeup of the prodigious artistic phenomenon that is Céline. (more…)