Journey to the End of the Night
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First published in 1932, Journey to the End of the Night was immediately acclaimed as a masterpiece and a turning point in French literature. Told in the first person by Céline’s fictional alter ego Bardamu, the novel is loosely based on the author’s own experiences during the First World War, in French colonial Africa, in the USA and, later, as a young doctor in a working-class suburb in Paris. Céline’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.
LOUIS-FERDINAND CÉLINE (1894–1961) was one of the most controversial authors of the twentieth century, a writer who mixed realism with imaginative fantasy, and, like his contemporary Henry Miller, an iconoclast who shocked many of his readers. His experiences as a soldier during the First World War and as a physician treating the poor in the suburbs of Paris gave him a jaundiced view of humanity, which he poured into a unique style of prose that is at the same time blackly humorous, daring and unsettling.