Journey to the End of the Night

Journey to the End of The Night – Ferdinand Celine

Celine’s first novel written in 1932 and, this Ralph Manheim translation in 1983.. For many, this is considered a modern masterpiece. It is biographical in nature following Celine’s experiences as a soldier in WW I, as an adventurer in Africa, the United States and then settling into a career as a medical physician.

A fast moving tale in 430 pages, we meet a cast of characters worthy of a Dicken’s novel: soldiers, nurses, bureaucrats, greedy capitalists, inhumane colonists, ambitious prostitutes, working stiffs, medical researchers, lunatics, dysfunctional families and Ferdinand’s heartbroken best friend, Robinson. Interacting with these is the novel’s protagonist, Ferdinand show more Bardamu – alter ego to Celine.

Celine’s writing style is punchy, gritty, funny, cynical, insightful, and non-stop. While reading, I was often reminded of a slew of novelists, many who were directly influenced by him: William Burroughs, Paul Bowles, Roberto Bolano, Jack Kerouac, Joseph Heller, Henry Miller, Charles Bukowski, Ken Kesey, Roberto Arlt, Antonio Antunes, and the French novelist Michel Houellebecq. While not thinking of Philip Roth I later learned that he declared, “Celine is my Proust”.

The story unfolds as Bardamu, a young medical student sits in a café chatting with a friend. As they talk Ferdinand sees a platoon of recruits marching and, caught up in the patriotic gallant fervor, he impulsively follows them and is recruited into the army.

Celine captures the day-to-day life of the soldier at war: “in the four weeks the war had been going on, we’d grown tired, so miserable, that tiredness had taken away some of my fear…every yard of darkness ahead of us was a promise of death and destruction.”

He quickly though learns the ropes, regular recruits avoided all enemy contacts: “We seemed to be looking for them, but we beat it the moment we laid eyes on them”. As Celine describes these scenes one can envision Joseph Heller transcribing his Catch 22, or one sitting in front of the telly watching an episode of F Troop or MASH. On a nighttime mission, “I moved from tree to tree, accompanied by the clanking of my hardware. All by itself my pretty saber made as much noise as a piano. I don’t know if I was deserving of sympathy, but for sure I was certainly grotesque.”

Inevitably injured, shot, Ferdinand takes leave to Paris where he takes up with an “adorable” American nurse, Lola, yet he succumbs to a panic attack, while walking in a park, “behind every tree a dead man”. Later in a crowded restaurant, “they’re going to shoot…beat it all of you, unrestrained” the MPs come to get him, “delirious, driven mad by fear…to the hospital.”

As he struggles with his recovery he and his fellow veterans’ frequent whorehouses, (this passage captures both Celine’s humor and cynicism):

“We went there to grope for our happiness, which all the world was threatening with the utmost ferocity. We were ashamed of wanting what we wanted, but something had to be done about it all the same. Love is harder to give up than life. In this world we spend our time killing or adoring, or both together. ‘I hate you! I adore you!’ We keep going, we fuel and refuel, we pass on our life to a biped in the next century, with frenzy, at any cost, as if it were the greatest of pleasures to perpetuate ourselves, as if, when all’s said and done, it would make us immortal. One way or another, kissing is as indispensable as scratching.”

Found unfit for duty, Bardamu takes off for Africa, looking for escape and possibly a fresh start on life. After a horribly uncomfortable passage he arrives and finds employment in a colony governed by French bureaucrats. Everyone was miserable but “virulent anarchy was held in check, like crabs in a basket, by a hermetic police structure. The civil servants griped in vain, for the Governor, to keep his colony in subjection, was able to recruit all the moth-eaten mercenaries he needed, impoverished blacks driven to the coast by debts, defeated by the law of supply and demand, and needful of something to eat. These recruits were taught the law and how to admire the Governor. The Governor seemed to wear all the gold in the treasury on his uniform…in the blazing sunshine, it surpassed belief, even without the plumes.”

It does not take long for Bardamu to become disillusioned. He quickly sees the failure of colonialism and capitalism for what it is. In the blazing hot sun and rotting jungles of Africa no one survives. From the natives, to the clerks, the Director, each trying to make their way, but the tropics take its toll and the only winners are the stockholders “on Rue Money in Paris”.

He meets up with his old Army buddy Robinson who is already planning his escape to the coast and freedom. Bardamu takes to a canoe but ends up in the hands of a slave galley that takes him to New York. Adventures there and in Detroit are well described in gritty and humorous ways. Again, disillusioned Bardamu longs to return to Paris.

There he finished his medical training and becomes a doctor in the poor side of town, Rancy on the outskirts of Paris. A meager existence he finds, often stiffed by his working-class clients, he succumbs to begging for his fees as if he were a waiter in a sidewalk café. In a crazy kind of way this existence suited him, a man with no interest in making it, surviving from day to day, existing on his wits and dismal philosophies of life. Sadly, he observes, “old age means not having a passionate role to play anymore, seeing your theater fold up on you, so there’s nothing but death to look forward to.”

Life takes a turn when he is hired to doctor at an asylum for the mentally ill. Located in a more middle-class neighborhood Celine captures the essence of suburban culture: “the people are anxious, the children no longer have the same accent as their parents…the local cleaning women raised their prices…a bookmaker has been sighted…the priest says ‘shit’ at the drop of a hat and gives stock market tips to his parishioners…three developers have gone to jail. Progress sweeps on!"

The last section of the book takes place at the asylum as many characters return to play out the final act.

This is a book worth reading. A modern novel of the 1930s that is still current in its descriptions, analysis and insights. A masterpiece. show less

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 show more 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. show less

Journey to the End of Night is like a "hero's journey" story but our hero, Ferdinand Bardamu, is kinda an asshole, but he's not unsympathetic. Bardamu starts by joining the French military and fighting in a war, then travelling to Africa, then on to America (New York and Detroit), then back to France. He works a variety of jobs, fucks a variety of women, and basically has some adventures of an ordinary caliber. His view of humanity is not often pleasant or optimistic, but then the world is full of idiots, jerks, and people with their own agendas.

Over and over again the words "night" and "darkness" come up. While sometimes they are literal, mainly they seem to describe the default feelings of many people. A sense of pointlessness or show more depression, emptiness or tedium, and ultimately death. It takes effort to escape the "night" and often there are only moments of "light" or "day" to break it up. As harsh as it may come across, it's difficult not to see some truth in this viewpoint of the human condition. show less

I battled through this novel, at first because I was on a train and had no other options (except not reading, which isn't an option) then out of sheer stubborn I’ve-started-so-I’ll-damn-well-finish. I can’t remember how ‘Journey to the End of the Night’ found itself on my reading list or who recommended it to me. For the most part, I found it to be a baffling tirade, nihilistic, splenetic, revolting, and tending to no definite conclusion. The reader reluctantly trails Ferdinand the narrator through the trenches, to the Belgian Congo, across the Atlantic to New York, to the grim banlieues of Paris, then finally to a mental hospital. The list of locales is as depressing as it sounds. I naively assumed that this novel would be show more about the First World War, in much the same way as I did with [b:A Farewell to Arms|10799|A Farewell to Arms|Ernest Hemingway|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1313714836s/10799.jpg|4652599]. In both cases, I was mistaken and bitterly disappointed as a result. Nonetheless, although Ferdinand the narrator is absolutely not an appealing figure, he has the edge over Hemingway’s Frederick due to self-awareness. Ferdinand knows that he is a hate-filled, hopeless, misogynistic, racist coward. Obviously that realisation doesn’t make him happy, as he spends the entire novel in an absolutely terrible mood. It’s still less enraging than Frederick’s point of view, though.

Where Hemingway does come out better, though, is in the quality of writing. I am tempted to ascribe this to the translation, as clearly the original French was colloquial and much of it is a stream of consciousness. Obviously that is always going to be difficult to faithfully yet comprehensibly translate. Sometimes it worked and there were phrases that I very much liked. Mostly it veered between pretentious, hilarious, and just plain bizarre. Maybe this was itself fully reflective of the original! I don’t know. Here is a sample paragraph which I think combines the awful and excellent aspects:

This body of ours, this disguise put on by common jumping molecules, is in constant revolt against the abominable farce of having to endure. Our molecules, the dears, want to get lost in the universe as fast as they can! It makes them miserable to be nothing but “us”, the jerks of infinity. We’d burst if we had the courage, day after day we come very close to it. The atomic torture we love so is locked up inside us with our pride.

Within that arbitrarily selected paragraph, I like the first sentence, especially the phrase ‘common jumping molecules’. The second sentence is marred by ‘the dears’ which seems like an odd choice by the translator. The third sentence then coins the phrase ‘jerks of infinity’, which doesn’t sound right to me either. I’d have gone for something stronger like ‘arseholes of infinity’. (Surely more vivid?) The fourth sentence is undistinguished, then the fifth seems like gibberish. Now that I think about it, perhaps the issue is inconsistency. Either the translator should have gone all-out with the profanity, or taken a more poetic, formal tone. The word ‘jerk’ is used so often and it has such a weak sound to it. (I’m curious to know what French word it stands in for; salaud?) This novel is evidently trying to provoke the reader, to repulse and disgust them. Strong words are called for, yet rarely included. The punctuation seems more faithful to the original, in that only French books seem to get away with such incredible overuse of ellipses and exclamation marks.

After finally getting through the last forty pages of the book whilst in the throes of an awful cold, I am in no mood to read either the foreword or the introduction, both of which doubtless opine on how excellent it is. I did read Céline’s own preface, though, in which he says that the book is vicious and should be suppressed. I’d have to agree with him on the former. Given the unpleasant effort required to read it, I cannot imagine it was anything other than torture to write. When finding myself utterly disenchanted with a supposed classic, I always wonder if I’m being stupid and reading it wrong. Still, it would be dishonest to say that I had anything other than very occasional glimmers of appreciation for this book. Angry male nihilism just gets on my nerves. show less

"If someone tells you he's unhappy, don't take it on faith. Just ask him if he can sleep ... If he can, then all's well. That's good enough."

What causes sleep disruption? More OSA and old age than shell shock these days. Hyperarousal managed with sleep hygiene and melatonin; the personal constitution no longer thought to have once been revealed in oneiric pastiche — our unhappiest sleep best. Is Celine's phrase a question of being too deep to sleep, or merely not deep enough to sleep deep.

Of wanting to be Voltaire (Caesar), yet unable to write the resolution of Candide without the plot-resolving-murder-plot. This is the quiet form of Pessoa's despair, but for authors of edgy novels who have written themselves into a corner, "Wanting show more to go and die in Peking (and not being able to)" (Book of Disquiet.) Vonnegut sure was a piece of work for lapping this guy's coattails, huh? “[One] is as innocent of Horror [Edification] as one is of sex,” show less

quizas con el tiempo pueda apreciar el libro mejor. ahora mismo solamente me siento aliviado de haberlo terminado. me parece una voz muy particular, muy unica y quizas esa es la mejor contribucion del libro: una vision -misantropica- del mundo. me divirtio mucho al principio pero al final ya no tenia mucho interes. la narracion es episodica y no hay una trama construyendose. no sentimentaliza a los pobres pero me parece que hay issues de clase. siempre son "ellos". no se idealiza a si mismo pero me parece que los comentarios mas crudos siempre los dirige a los demas. esa crudeza al fin tambien en un reflejo mecanico, en un manerismo. un refugio, un recurso seguro. hay un resentimiento profundo en el libro. tambien hay algo que parece show more bien comic underground. es antiautoritario y un poco adolescente. esa aficion por lo sordido, como la de paschke es solamente otro tipo de fantasia. en este caso es una fantasia escatologica y algo violenta. show less

Of course this was wildly revolutionary and changed the world and that sort of thing. On the other hand, it reminds me pretty strongly of the nineteenth century: a hefty dose of Baudelaire and Rimbaud; combined (odd, I admit) with seventeenth and eighteenth century picaresque novels. Does anything happen? Yes, lots of things. Do they have any connection whatsoever? Not really. Are any of them good? One or two, but mostly no. Is it a great book? Well, not any better than Tom Jones. And not close to as savage as Gulliver's Travels. And not as beautifully ugly as the aforementioned French poets. So, y'know. Revolutionary? Not really. Interesting? Sure.

Now, I must admit two important points: first, nothing pisses me off quite as much as show more when an author ruins an incredible 300 page novel by writing an okay 450 page one; and the translation, from 1983, makes Celine sound like a slightly grumpier Salinger. I'm not sure that's really the effect he was going for. I assume he's meant to sound like a lower class, under-sexed Sade. So these two things probably ruined my appreciation of the novel. Manheim was (I've been told) a great translator of German literature, and an okay translator of German philosophy. Maybe because he'd translated Mein Kampf and the transcripts from the Eichman trials someone thought he was a good bet for Celine? Darkside and all that? But nope.

It's also possible that having grown up when I did, the 'shocking' literature of previous ages lacks the shock effect. If you've ever heard moderately sad black metal you'll know that there's nothing misanthropic about Celine. If you've ever heard moderately violent hip-hop, you'll know there's not much violent about him. If you've read McCarthy, you'll know Celine's not all that terrifying. And if you've read anything written in the last 40 years you'll know that he's a literary prude. So. Where does this leave Celine? Basically, as a moralist who loves children and adores people who sacrifice themselves for the good of others. Now *that,* I admit, is shocking. show less