ferdinand celine journey to the end of the night

As I was reading, it was easy to see how Celine influenced the great Charles Bukowski, for instance. It is such a sprawling novel, with so many great passages, that I felt I had to write a review that did it justice.

It's taken me a long time to get around to reviewing this book. He could find them all right, but he couldn’t get them out, they’d stay in his mouth making noises.”Ī spectacular book that frowns on the human condition while making the most of it. “Nearly all a poor bastard’s desires are punishable by jail.” A New York City streetcar conductor is dressed “in the uniform of a Balkan prisoner of war.” And “Conversation with him could be kind of trying, because he had trouble with his words. There’s so much dazzling writing here that it’s almost inhuman. In Africa: “Alcide under his enormous bell-shaped pith helmet, a chunk of head, the face of a small cheese, and below it the rest of him, floating in his tunic, lost in a strange white-trousered memory.” He has the gift of putting together words in a unique manner. Humor born of hardship, perhaps exaggerated at times. The story is full of humor, mixed with horror dark, dark humor.

The two continue to cross paths and finally end up working, and living together, in an asylum that Bardamu eventually takes charge of when the owner decides to travel the world. “I had a crummy past behind me, and already it was coming back at me like the belchings of fate.” In Africa he had met Leon Robinson, whose past is no better. He then travels to Africa, America and finally back to Paris where he completes his medical studies and becomes an unsuccessful doctor. Ferdinand Bardamu has survived the horror of WWI.

Ferdinand celine journey to the end of the night