Death on the Instalment Plan

Louis-Ferdinand Céline

The Bodley Head

Journey to the End of the Night

Told in the first person and based on his own experiences during the First World War, in French colonial Africa and in America, where he worked for while at the Ford factory in Detroit, and later as a young doctor in a working class suburb in Paris, it gives a picture of those years as seen by an underdog. Celine's disgust with human folly, malice and greed comes over in superb portraits of mainly ordinary human beings coping with their lives as best they can, caught in their poverty or their obsessions, hindered by ignorance and prejudice from evading traps of their own making.

Journey to the end of the night

Literature & Fiction

Literary

New Directions

Death on Credit

Calder Publications

Fable for Another Time (French Modernist Library)

Fable for Another Time is one of the most significant and far-reaching literary texts of postwar France. Composed in the tumultuous aftermath of World War II, largely in the Danish prison cell where the author was awaiting extradition to France on charges of high treason, the book offers a unique perspective on the war, the postwar political purges in France, and Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s own dissident politics. The tale of a man imprisoned and reviled by his own countrymen, the Fable follows its character’s decline from virulent hatred to near madness as a result of his violent frustration with the hypocrisy and banality of his fellow human beings. In part because of the story’s clear link to his own case—and because of the legal and political difficulties this presented—Céline was compelled to push his famously elliptical, brilliantly vitriolic language to new and extraordinary extremes in Fable for Another Time. The resulting linguistic and stylistic innovation make this work stand out as one of the most original and revealing literary undertakings of its time. Louis-Ferdinand Céline (1894–1961) was a French writer and physician best known for the novels Journey to the End of the Night (1932) and Death on the Installment Plan (1936). Céline was accused of collaboration during World War II and fled France in 1944 to live first in Germany, then in Denmark, where he was imprisoned for over a year; an amnesty in 1951 allowed him to return to France. Céline remains anathema to a large segment of French society for his antisemitic writings; at the same time his novels are enormously admired by each new generation.

Mary Hudson

Bison Books

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.”

Death on the Installment Plan (ND Paperbook)

Humor & Satire

The dark side of On the Road : instead of seeking kicks, the French narrator travels the globe to find an ever deeper disgust for life. Louis-Ferdinand Celine's revulsion and anger at what he considered the idiocy and hypocrisy of society explodes from nearly every page of this novel. Filled with slang and obscenities and written in raw, colloquial language, Journey to the End of the Night is a literary symphony of violence, cruelty and obscene nihilism. This book shocked most critics when it was first published in France in 1932, but quickly became a success with the reading public in Europe, and later in America where it was first published by New Directions in 1952. The story of the improbable yet convincingly described travels of the petit-bourgeois (and largely autobiographical) antihero, Bardamu, from the trenches of World War I, to the African jungle, to New York and Detroit, and finally to life as a failed doctor in Paris, takes the readers by the scruff and hurtles them toward the novel's inevitable, sad conclusion.

Contemporary

New Directions Publishing Corporation

Text: English, French (translation)

The celebrated French author's first autobiographical novel takes Ferdinand Bardamu on a search for fulfillment and meaning through Flemish battlefields, Parisian alleys, American slums and factories, and back to the suburbs of Paris

Journey to the End of the Night (English and French Edition)

Céline’s masterpiece―colloquial, polemic, hyper-realistic, boiling over with black humor Céline’s masterpiece―colloquial, polemic, hyper realistic―boils over with bitter humor and revulsion at society’s idiocy and hypocrisy: Journey to the End of the Night is a literary symphony of cruelty and violence that hurtles through the improbable travels of the petit bourgeois (and largely autobiographical) antihero, Bardamu: from the trenches of WWI, to the African jungle, to New York, to the Ford Factory in Detroit, and finally to life in Paris as a failed doctor. Ralph Manheim’s pitch-perfect translation captures Céline’s savage energy, and a dynamic afterword by William T. Vollmann presents a fresh, furiously alive take on this astonishing novel.

Reference

Voyage au Bout de la Nuit

French & European Pubns

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Louis-Ferdinand Céline. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Louis-Ferdinand Céline

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Louis-Ferdinand Céline. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Death on the Instalment Plan

Journey to the end of the night

Death on Credit

Fable for Another Time (French Modernist Library)

Death on the Installment Plan (ND Paperbook)

Journey to the End of the Night

Journey to the end of the night

Journey to the End of the Night (English and French Edition)

Journey to the End of the Night

Voyage au Bout de la Nuit