Journey to the End of the Night

Fülszöveg

TOTnE Ei»u OFTnE NnjriT
Translated by Ralph Manheim
First published in 1932, Journey to the End of the Night was the masterpiece of Céline (the pseudonym of Dr. Louis-Ferdinand Destouches). Told in the first person and based on his own experiences during the First World War, in French colonial Africa, in America, 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, it gives a picture of those years as seen by an underdog. Celine's disgust with human folly, malice and greed comes over in superb portraits of mainly ordinary human beings coping with their lives as best they can, caught in their poverty or their obsessions, hindered by ignorance and prejudice from evading traps of their own making.
Celine is very much a product of his age and was particularly marked, like so many other writers, by the senseless carnage of the First World War. His disgust with the mess that man has made of society and of his... Tovább

Fülszöveg

TOTnE Ei»u OFTnE NnjriT
Translated by Ralph Manheim
First published in 1932, Journey to the End of the Night was the masterpiece of Céline (the pseudonym of Dr. Louis-Ferdinand Destouches). Told in the first person and based on his own experiences during the First World War, in French colonial Africa, in America, 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, it gives a picture of those years as seen by an underdog. Celine's disgust with human folly, malice and greed comes over in superb portraits of mainly ordinary human beings coping with their lives as best they can, caught in their poverty or their obsessions, hindered by ignorance and prejudice from evading traps of their own making.
Celine is very much a product of his age and was particularly marked, like so many other writers, by the senseless carnage of the First World War. His disgust with the mess that man has made of society and of his own environment lies behind the bitterness and the bile that distinguishes his writing and gives it its force. Unfortunately, he ended his days in disgrace. The rise of fascism seemed to him to be the answer to the failings of corrupt democratic government, and resulted in his support of the German occupiers of France during the Second World War. He was imprisoned after the liberation of France, but released because of poor health in 1951. Journey to the end of the Night has remained one of the key works of twentieth-century French literature. Vissza