Louis-Ferdinand Céline

Gecenin sonuna yolculuk

Viaggio al termine della notte

Gecenin Sonuna Yolculuk

Profesör Y ile konuşmalar

Completed the day before his death in 1961, Rigadoon, the most compassionate of Celine's novels, explores the ravages of war and its aftermath. Often comic and always angry, the first-person autobiographical narrator, with his wife and their cat in tow, takes the reader with him on his flight from Paris to Denmark after finding himself on the losing side of World War II. The train rides that encompass the novel are filled with madness and mercy, as Celine, a physician, aids refugees while ignoring his own medical needs.

Rigadoon

So begins the imaginary interview that comprises this novel. Professor Y, the interviewing academic, asks questions that allow Céline, a character in his own book, the chance to rail against convention and defend his idiosyncratic methods. In the course of their outrageous interplay, Céline comes closer to defining and justifying his poetics than in any of his other novels. But this is more than just an interview. As the book moves forward, Professor Y reveals his real identity and the characters travel through the streets of Paris toward a bizarre climax that parodies the author, the critic, and, most of all, the establishment.

Conversations with Professor Y

The hero, the semi-autobiographical Ferdinand, moves through the nightmare of London's underworld during the years of World War I. In this distressing setting, he meets pimps and prostitutes, pawnbrokers and magicians, policemen and arsonists. He sees social and physiological decomposition as these processes unfold along parallel lines of development. The illusions of existence are nakedly exposed. The narrative erupts in Céline's characteristic elliptical style. His splintered sentences and scatology reflect his fury at the fragmentation of experience and at his own impotence in the face of it. Out of his rage, he forces the meaninglessness back on itself, and the exuberance of his struggle triumphs in the comic exaggeration of satire. Ultimately, his subject is not death but life, and he responds to it by a strengthened commitment to the sensual and concrete. His hallucinatory world is so vividly realized that it does, indeed, challenge the reality of the reader's more conventional world.

Guignol's Band

A nihilistic petit-bougeois named Bardamu opens his medical practice in the slums of suburban Paris.

Journey to the End of the Night

Cultural Writing. Fiction. New to SPD. Celine's first novel, Journey to the End of the Night and its sequel, Death on Credit, were a new kind of novel, frank about the author's thoughts and actions in a way that readers had never encountered, ultra-realistic, and full of incidents that could not possibly be true to life, characters that stretched the imagination in spite of their having obviously been drawn from life. In Death on Credit, Ferdinand Bardamu, Celine's alter ego, is a doctor in Paris treating the poor, who seldom pay him but who take every advantage of his availability. The action is not continuous but goes back in time to earlier memories and often moves into fantasy. This fascinating book by one of the greatest 20th-century novelists is an unforgettable experience for the reader. Translated and with an introduction by Ralph Manheim.

Death on Credit

Safar bih intihā-yi shab

Marg-i qisṭı̄

"La vérité, là, tout simplement, la librairie souffre d'une très grave crise de mévente. Allez pas croire un seul zéro de tous ces prétendus tirages à 100 000 ! 40 000 ! ... et même 400 exemplaires ! ... attrape-gogos ! Alas ! ... Alas ! ... seule la "presse du cœur"... et encore ! ... se défend pas trop mal... et un peu la "série noire"... et la "blême"... En vérité, on ne vend plus rien... c'est grave ! le Cinéma, la télévision, les articles de ménage, le scooter, l'auto à 2, 4, 6 chevaux, font un tort énorme au livre... tout "vente à tempérament", vous pensez ! et "les week-ends" ! ... et ces bonnes vacances bi ! trimensuelles ! ... et les Groisières Lololulu ! ... salut, petits budgets ! ... voyez dettes ! ... plus un fifrelin disponible ! ... alors n'est-ce pas, acheter un livre ! ...".

Entretiens avec le professeur Y

Dominic Di Bernardi

One of the last major untranslated works by France's most controversial author, London Bridge is a riotous novel about the London underworld during World War I. Picking up where Guignol's Band (1944; English translation 1954) left off, Céline's autobiographical narrator recounts his disastrous partnership with a mystical Frenchman (intent on financing a trip to Tibet by winning a gas-mask competition); his uneasy relationship with London's pimps and whores and their common nemesis, Inspector Matthew of Scotland Yard; and, most scandalously, his affair with a baronet's 14-year-old daughter, an English angel whose descent into vice is suspiciously smooth. He dreams of escaping with her to America to start a new life, but he, his mystical partner, and his under-aged mistress finally awake to reality crossing windswept London Bridge. Written in his trademark style-a headlong rush of slang, brusque observation, and quirky lyricism, delivered in machine-gun bursts of prose and ellipses-Céline re-creates the dark days during the Great War with sordid verisimilitude and desperate hilarity, expertly captured in Dominic Di Bernardi's racy translation.

London Bridge

Death on the Installment Plan is a companion volume to Louis-Ferinand Céline's earlier novel Journey to the End of Night. Published in rapid succession in the middle 1930s, these two books shocked European literatue and world consciousness. Nominally fiction but more rightly called "creative confessions," they told of the author's childhood in excoriating Paris slums, of serves 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."

Death on the Installment Plan

Chết chịu

Louis Ferdinand Destouches

Edition originale non censurée. Les Beaux Draps est édité sous l'Occupation le 28 février 1941 aux Nouvelles Éditions françaises. Le titre est une référence à l'expression populaire être dans de beaux draps . Louis-Ferdinand Céline exprime une nouvelle fois son aversion des Juifs et des francs-maçons, son dégoût de la démocratie parlementaire, sa vision très sombre du déclin de la France dans l'entre-deux-guerres, sa xénophobie, mais aussi sa sympathie pour l'occupant allemand. Cependant, l'ouvrage fut interdit en zone occupée le 4 décembre 1941 par le gouvernement de Vichy, qui y essuie de nombreuses critiques. C'est dans ce pamphlet que l'écrivain développe son idée des semaines de travail de trente-cinq heures, qu'il nomme le communisme Labiche (d'Eugène Labiche, auteur de vaudevilles).

Les beaux draps

Colloqui con il professor Y

Morte a credito

'Viagem ao fim da noite' procura denunciar sofrimento de viver e a fragilidade da condição humana. Neste relato semiautobiográfico, Céline narra a vida do anti-herói Ferdinand Bardamu, cuja trajetória começa na Primeira Guerra, passa pela África colonial, por uma América do Norte em franca industrialização e desemboca de volta na França, onde o protagonista se estabelece como médico num subúrbio de Paris.

Louis-Ferdinand Céline

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