by Louis-Ferdinand
Céline (Author), Ralph Manheim
(Translator)
Publisher : New
Directions (January 17, 1971)
Softcover, 592 pages
“Junk is fragile. I
ruined tons of stuff, never on purpose. The thought of antiques still makes me
sick, but that was our bread and butter. The scrapings of time are sad. . .
lousy, sickening. We sold the stuff over the customer's dead body. We'd wear
him down. We'd drown his wits in floods of hokum. . . incredible bargains. . .
we were merciless. . . He couldn't win. . . If he had any wits to begin with,
we demolished them. . . He'd walk out stunned with the Louis XIII cup in his
pocket, the openwork fan with cat and shepherdess wrapped in tissue paper. You
can't imagine how they revolted me, grown-ups taking such crap home with them.”
This is the sequel to
Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s autobiography Journey
to the End of Night. This is not meant to be a complete blow-by-blow
truthful account of his childhood. It’s too precise with long bouts of dialogue
and wild abuse of ellipsis to fully make this a comprehensive chronological
book. Say that it is emotionally accurate to the author’s growing up and trying
to succeed in the slums of Paris around the turn of the previous century.
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| Author Louis-Ferdinand Céline |
The action often moves
into fantasy and the style becomes deliberately rougher. Sentences disintegrate
to hook the taste of the crawling world of the Paris slums. The sleazy stories
of families whose destiny is ruled by their own stupidity and greed.
I’m sure many people
would become frustrated by this novel's bizarre style, dips into fantasy, and
otherwise amoral tone, however it offers a profound vision of the nature of
human existence for the socio-economically deprived, rooted in suffering and
inertia. The book expresses ideas that stretch the limitations of perception
while providing almost no structure to assign any meaning to life as a whole.
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| The author reclined |
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