Louis Ferdinand C Line

Death on the Installment Plan is a companion volume to Louis-Ferinand Céline's earlier novel Journey to the End of Night. Death on the Installment Plan is a companion volume to Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s earlier novel, Journey to the End of the Night. Published in rapid succession in the middle 1930s, these two books shocked European literature and world consciousness. Nominally fiction but more rightly called “creative confessions,” they told of the author’s childhood in excoriating Paris slums, of service in the mud wastes of World War I and African jungles. Mixing unmitigated despair with Gargantuan comedy, they also created a new style, in which invective and obscenity were laced with phrases of unforgettable poetry. Céline’s influence revolutionized the contemporary approach to fiction. Under a cloud for a period, his work is now acknowledged as the forerunner of today’s “black humor.”

In Germany near the end of World War II, 1,400 members of the Vichy France government hide in a labyrinthine castle and attempt to postpone the postwar reckoning.

The most blackly humorous and disenchanted voice in all of French literature. London Review of Books

The first English-language biography in more than two decades of the French writer, one of the great novelists of the twentieth century. Louis-Ferdinand Céline was one of the most innovative novelists of the twentieth century, and his influence both in his native France and beyond remains huge. This book sheds light on Céline’s groundbreaking novels, which drew extensively on his complex life: he rose from humble beginnings to worldwide literary fame, then dramatically fell from grace only to return, belatedly, to the limelight. Céline’s subversive writing remains fresh and urgent today, despite his controversial political views and inflammatory pamphlets that threatened to ruin his reputation. The first English-language biography of Céline in more than two decades, this book explores new material and reminds us why the author belongs in the pantheon of modern greats.

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.

A landmark event: the last of C'line's novels to be translated into English, this account of an air attack on Paris during World War II shows a hallucinatory, altered space in which human aggressions, appetites, and suspicion come boiling to the surface in preposterous dimensions. A frantic narrator, in search of complicity, relates the story of an apocalyptic ballet that leaves reason and order in shreds, as bombing turns Montmartre into an underworld teeming with dirty deeds, while our guide resists the inhumanity with animal desperation and robust hilarity. C'line animates the events with the exuberance and speed of his narrative style, fully developed and uninhibited, and fully his own.

Drawing on a wealth of unpublished letters and documents and first-ever interviews with Celine's widow, Frederic Vitoux brilliantly weaves together all the available information on Celine into an extraordinary portrait of Celine's temptuous life and times. Photographs.

"There's a book you won't hear a word about on the radio. There's a book the right-thinking newspapers will not speak about, except to refer to it prim and reproachful terms. There's a book about which the tabloids of the left will say nothing, except the most inept of them, which only have words of scorn. There's a book the sale and distribution of which is quite possibly forbidden. There's a book against which there will be more a conspiracy of silence than of attack. Isn't it a crying shame that, before any reservations, we cannot praise boldness, courage, ardor? There is a rather striking phrase in CEline's book, this book that we will be prevented from discussing. He announces his invectives as a kind of "revolt of the natives." And I think of those Arab towns-always situated next to a Jewish one-which, from time to time, in a fit of popular anger, throw themselves in fury on the Jewish quarter and plunder it. We do not want any violence. But when one has a Jewish Prime Minister, when one sees, clearly and simply, France dominated by the Jews, it also should be understood how this violence is prepared, and what explains it. I do not even say what legitimates it, I say what explains it. Have any opinion you want. On the Jews and on CEline. We do not agree with him on all points. But I am telling you: this enormous book, this splendid book, is the first sign of the "revolt of the natives." Perhaps this revolt is excessive, more instinctive than reasonable: after all, the natives are us..." Robert Brasillach.