Synopses & Reviews
A landmark event: the last of Céline'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. Céline animates the events with the exuberance and speed of his narrative style, fully developed and uninhibited, and fully his own.
Review
"To read any one single novel by Celine is to receive, in a bracing style, a hysterical primer on the abjection of being." Wyatt Mason
Review
Céline is one of the great revolutionaries of prose of our century, as great as Joyce or Kafka. --The London Spectator
Review
Céline was the black humorist to his age three decades before the term was invented . . . Alongside this apocalyptically-minded Paris doctor our local batch of black comics are pretty gray cats.
Review
Increasingly, it does look as if the novels of Günter Grass, of William Burroughs, and of Norman Mailer would not have been written without Céline's precedent.
Synopsis
"Céline's mastery in creating one of the truly cathartic experiences of contemporary literature is indisputable."--Saturday Review
About the Author
Louis-Ferdinand Céline (1894-1961) was a French writer and doctor whose novels are antiheroic visions of human suffering. Accused of collaboration with the Nazis, Céline fled France in 1944 first to Germany and then to Denmark. Condemned by default (1950) in France to one year of imprisonment and declared a national disgrace, Céline returned to France after his pardon in 1951, where he continued to write until his death. His classic books include Journey to the End of the Night, Death on the Installment Plan, London Bridge, North, Rigadoon, Conversations with Professor Y, Castle to Castle, and Normance.Marlon Jones grew up in California, and lives in England. With Josephine Berganza and Jeff Fort, he translated French Theory by François Cusset.