Journey to the End of the Night

Journey to the End of Night is the ultimate in French nihilistic, hedonistic, politically incorrect, epic, historical wandering fiction.

The main character, a Parisian gadabout named Bardamu, is a stand-in for the author Celine. As reliable a human being (and narrator) as a house on fire, the opportunistic Bardamu pinballs through World War I, colonial Africa, and the United States before returning home to Paris.

Almost every sentence of this mid-20th century classic could get an author cancelled these days and almost every page provides both beautiful description and a sentence or two that made me laugh out loud. This… show more.

Whether you love him or hate him (as he was a tortured and unpleasant soul), Céline innovated the philosophical novel in the modern context and brought the genre to its pinnacle with Journey to the End of the Night. Reflecting on the horrors, absurdity, and stupidity of World War I, returning soldier Ferdinand Bardamu (a stand-in for Céline) finds himself equally miserable in “peacetime” serving as a doctor for the poor in Paris (Céline was trained as a doctor). Céline is occasionally compared to another French writer of philosophical novels: Jean-Paul… show more.

Celine is the big daddy of low life, the snarling metronome of misanthropy. Nearly a hundred years since its publication, it is as fresh as a daisy and should convince anybody that writing about real-life and what you think has more merit than all the BS that goes into all the other literary BS you think you should be writing or reading, because someone told you it should be elevated above the ordinary. Celine says what he thinks, warts and all. (Although it did get out of hand later in his life when he goes full throttle antisemitic!) He puts… show more.