843222183X

8435004023

Στη Ριρή από Ειρήνη 2009

Ferdinand Bardamu has survived the horror of WWI. He then travels to Africa, America and finally back to Paris where he completes his medical studies and becomes an unsuccessful doctor. “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. 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.



The story is full of humor, mixed with horror; dark, dark humor. Humor born of hardship, perhaps exaggerated at times. Celine’s descriptions are otherwordly. 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.



There’s so much dazzling writing here that it’s almost inhuman. “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. He could find them all right, but he couldn’t get them out, they’d stay in his mouth making noises.”



A spectacular book that frowns on the human condition while making the most of it. ( )

3814. Journey to the End of the Night, by Louis-Ferdinand Celine (read 18 Oct 2003) This is on the Guardian's list of the 100 greatest novels of all time put out on Oct 12, 2003--and I enjoy such lists and anything thereon not read by me is a temptation. I had read 66 of the works on the list and so read this, a 1932 novel telling of a cynical Frenchman who fights in World War I, gets out of the Army after being wounded, goes to Africa, New York, Detroit, and then returns to France and becomes a doctor. In the history of the novel it is an important work, its author having been described as "the strongest subterranean force in the novel today" and being credited with influencing Sartre, Henry Miller, Albert Camus, Samuel Beckett, and the like. I am glad I read it so I know it, but that it was very enjoyable I will not claim. ( )