I finished the book but I'm still rereading the large number of paragraphs that I underlined, and I like it more and more each time. Perhaps rather than a review, I should simply transcribe some paragraphs to try to do justice to this amazing novel.

The protagonist of the novel is Ferdinand Bardamu. In a fit of patriotism upon seeing a military parade, he decides to join the army during World War I. And although he quickly regrets his decision, his life will never be the same as he becomes aware of all the human misery that he has to live with in the battlefield. "At twenty years old, I already only had the past," Ferdinand says about his life after the war.

From his departure from the war, a life of boredom, anxiety, and alienation follows him, leading him from one place to another without being able to feel comfortable anywhere, not even beside the woman he loves.

A raw novel, in a very colloquial style, whose narration in several passages is a huge cataract of misanthropy and nihilism, but with impeccable lucidity and clarity.

It's not an easy read, especially in the first half. One has to take it slowly, but I think it's well worth the read. The translation by Edhasa didn't appeal to me, so if there's another translation with good reviews, I recommend considering it.

“The great weariness of existence perhaps is, in a word, nothing but that enormous effort that we make to remain twenty years old, forty, even more, reasonable, to not be simply, profoundly ourselves, that is, filthy, atrocious, absurd.”

Kabosi is this magic of revealing the cowardice within us as bravery, in the guise of the end of all hopes, from morning till night...

Horses are very lucky because although they also endure war like us, at least none of them wants to sign up or vow that they have faith in their work.

The homeland now accepts all kinds of sacrifices and all kinds of flesh without regard to origin and source... The homeland has become pure air in the selection of its martyrs...

The code of disappearance of the unknown farmers! This is the real destiny of the real soldier!

The suppression of the sun by thieves occurs in all countries, and that too with intensity, not just as a means of social defense! But mostly as a serious looting of all the unfortunate who sit on their own thrones and know their own class...

The world only knows how to kill, it rotates on you just like a sleeper who accidentally kicks his blankets, it takes you away. There is no possibility of a more stupid death than this, that is, just like the others die...

War had burned some and warmed others, just like fire that can cause a wound or heat, depending on whether you sit in it or on top of it...

It is better that the pharaohs of ancient Egypt and the Tatar khans no longer camp in front of us! These ancient amateurs in the art of using the two-legged animal were the results of naivety that only their claims deceived the ears of the sky. These Bedouins could not call their burden (sir), sometimes they would also vote for him as the president, buy a newspaper for him or fight on the battlefield so that the fire and heat of it would cool down!

War is always present in the midst of the criminal nations of humans, ready to rise from the swamps that are the prison of poverty. Have enough poor people been killed? It is not known... Maybe it is necessary to strangle anyone who has nothing on his head? Again the world comes, again the poor come to the world and the situation is always like this until someone comes and understands this joke... Just as the grass is cut so short that in the end good and delicate grass is left...

An enormous tiredness exists, perhaps piled up on top of each other, it is nothing but this great pain that you give to yourself to stay young, to stay twenty years old, to stay forty years old, to stay more and to stay sane, or to no longer be what you were, that is, past and horrible and disgusting...

Let others say and think whatever they want, but the reality is that life abandons us even before we abandon it forever.

I'll write more here, maybe, but no. I had never read this before. It is the first half of a work that also includes (in English translation) Death on the Installment Plan. Published in 1932 (with an English translation published in 1952 that I bought in the seventies at San Francisco's City Lights Bookstore, then lost after I had read some excerpts, and maybe some of it in collections later), it is a semi-autobiographical novel. Celine also called it "confessions," focused on Ferdinand Bardamu and his doppleganger Robinson. For the time, it was profane, colloquial, and conversational, and is associated with the word nihilism more than almost any other word. But he was deliberately working to use working class Parisian language, siding with the working class throughout.

Since in the last couple of years I have been rereading some of Charles Bukowski's works, and knowing Celine to be one of his very favorite writers, I couldn't get out of my head how influenced Bukowski seems by this guy's life perspective and honest, profane, yet always interesting writing style (oh, Celine is much better, but what I like [and dislike] in Bukowski I also find in Celine).

Nihilism? Maybe. But black comedy seems like a better fit. Bardamu fights in the war (WWI) and excoriates military leaders, war profiteers, patriots, and war itself, which doesn't seem unreasonable to me. It reminded me a bit of Joseph Heller's Catch 22 or Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five in its amused cynicism. In general, this experience sets Bardamu on a path altogether against ideals, commitments, and beliefs. From the war, he travels to Africa, then New York, then back to study to become a (failed) doctor in Paris, and then to work in a madhouse. Bardamu, like Bukowski, loves women (though especially sex with women, and some say as they say about Bukowski that he is a misogynist but--consider the source, oh, I dunno). He actually says he loves Molly, in New York, but almost everyone and everything else on the planet he skewers.

He sides with the poor over the rich, though. His work is memoir, but enhanced, shall we say, and washed in sometimes hilarious dark satire on modern society, capitalism, hierarchy. It might also have inspired Hunter Thompson in such works as Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Some echoes of Kafka in its absurd look at bureaucracy, meaningless work. But more profane and more manic. A raucous rant.

He's pretty miserable at times, and admits that he "loves his misery." But in that process, I found him pretty likeable and amusing. And it's eminently readable, really great in so many ways. As this is one of the great French novels, I can see how it prefigured much existentialist thought, and I can see why some of the post-war Beats felt a kinship with him.

I ate a delicious meal that was full of oil. I ate a lot of it with a spoon, and it seems that my digestion will take a long time.

Maybe I should have been more careful when choosing what to eat. But sometimes, the temptation of delicious food is just too hard to resist.

Now, I'm feeling a bit uncomfortable in my stomach. I guess this is a lesson for me to pay more attention to my diet in the future.

I should try to choose healthier options and not overindulge in rich and oily foods.

Well, at least I can learn from this experience and make better choices next time.

In the Name of Him

There are some writers and poets whose works must be read privately, enjoyed, and not recommended to others except to a limited few, even though you love them very much and are interested in them, so that others can also benefit from the literary works of these greats. For me, Louis Ferdinand Celine is one of these greats.

I am not a fan of French literature, although I have read some of its novels. Except for a few works, I don't have a particular interest in the French. But Celine is something else for me. It seems that he is not French at all and has no respect for the rules and principles of French writers. In other words, according to the clichés that can be attributed to this literature, Celine is a complete anti-French, an angry, restless, and talkative rebel writer who, with his special style, laughs at the most prestigious literary norms. And this is what has made him controversial and condemned both during his lifetime and after his death.

I have read three of Celine's books in this order: "Journey to the End of the Night", "Death on the Installment Plan", and "The Castle of Purity". Among these, the first two books, "Journey to the End of the Night" and "Death on the Installment Plan", are better works. And according to many, only these two books can be considered among the great literary works. The books after these two, with the excesses that Celine has in his special style, are more similar to the quick and fleeting articles and writings that Celine wrote during his heyday to oppose the opposing trends.

I myself could not finish "The Castle of Purity". Of course, if we read these books in French, we will surely benefit from Celine's linguistic abilities. In any case, "Journey to the End of the Night" and "Death on the Installment Plan", especially "Journey to the End of the Night", have a classic structure and can attract the reader more than all his other books.

But why don't I recommend reading some novels of people like Celine, Günter Grass, and Gabriel García Márquez to all my friends? I must say that I completely believe in the masculine and feminine novels and the clear and chaste space that Grass shows in "The Tin Drum" and Márquez in "One Hundred Years of Solitude" is not suitable for women because these spaces are very masculine and the perception that a man has from these works is completely incomparable with that of a woman. And on the other hand, these books may put aside the basic ethics of individuals. So I don't recommend them to all my friends. Please make your own judgment, dear friends.

In any case, reading "Journey to the End of the Night" with the translation of the late Farhad Ghobari was very enjoyable for me.

In the beginning, there was nothing but sensation. Only excitement and emotions existed, and everything happened in silence. I was a single cell, only capable of responding to external stimuli and living with a voracious sense. There was action and response. There was no language. In the face of cold, I gathered myself, shivered, and in the face of heat, I opened myself up. In the beginning, for centuries, there was only sensation. That particular type of human responded in this way to the stimuli of language. There was no need for anything additional. In the beginning, everything was simple but uniform.

Then you came. With a box of words in your hand. You stood in front of me, amazed and confused. You thought, what should I do with this being whose very existence hints at purity?

With the fingers of both your hands, you pointed to two areas on my shapeless body and created two holes. You opened your box and took out two actions. You sowed them in the pits you had just created. You said, be happy. But I didn't move. I didn't know the actions. I had no understanding of this special type of stimulus. You said, be sad. Again, you didn't see any sign of me receiving the message. You were telling me something, but I didn't know how to do it. My law of life was: "When there is no silence, nothing happens."

You reached into your box again, took out another action and sowed it beside my pit. "Read." And I got warm. I twisted and turned, hard, hard, hard. I opened myself up. I took shape. You, pleased with the result of your work, sowed in another of my pits, "Read me," and I got even warmer. I came to life.

This time, with the pressure of your two middle fingers and your pointer in the area that became my face, you completed my shape. And I no longer had sensation. Now I had understanding. I understood the actions. Now the actions had replaced the excitement. Everything had come to perfection. The world had gained dimension and the dusty color had been discovered. You opened my eyes and ears. You showed me the side that was dark and black, a deep black that made me fall into it and swallow us in two steps.

You gave life to me and to the language of the world's sorrow.

Then you spoke to me with your promise.

You asked: Do you know where you are? I answered: Here.

You asked: Do you know who you are? I answered: I am myself.

You asked: Do you know what time it is? I answered: It is either day or night.

Then, you, the living-clothed God of the whispering, kissed my forehead and said with cold contradiction: Welcome to the abode of sorrows.

_________________________

I could write a summary review of the story for you, but I prefer to let you be the guest of my thoughts instead.

You must read this book. Hurry up and read it before it's too late. This novel is very interesting and captivating. You will surely be drawn into it. Maybe you will even hate it intensely, who knows, but that's okay too. This novel also needs the attention of the merciless critics to become famous. So read it and feel the truth within it. Derive great pleasure from it. But be careful not to swallow the bait. This story is very interesting and engaging, but it is not a complete mirror of Selin's life. ((This novel is fictional.)). As "Jean Genet" said about this book: ((If what Selin wrote in this book were true, he would surely have committed suicide.)).

___________________________

On the forehead of the house of the gods, these words are inscribed by Selin Hekaki:

The world of Selin, this poor confusion, which spent all of its life in poverty and deprivation, is a world of all the light flights and the empty dreams and the hollow hopes. His world, with all its darkness, is a real and believable world for every truth-seeking human being.

"Mohammad Reza Mousavi / Bakhara Magazine 51"

After he burned his scented incense over the coffin of orthodoxy and good literary ways, Selin bestowed upon modern literature his most corporeal, personal axis. This was something he had already said in the first 100 pages of his Journey, but like every vortex over chaos, he wanted to scatter all the techniques he knew to the outside, to deepen even more, acutely and venomously, all the nuances of the black.

"There is no more divine object of worship than our scent, it's over. All our misfortune is due to the fact that we must remain, at all costs, Jean, Pierre or Gaston, for several years. Our body, this mask of ever-moving and most common parts, constantly rebels against this farce of lasting. Our parts want to go as fast as possible to be lost in the universe, my gold! It tortures them that they are only 'us', a grain of sand of the infinite. We would disintegrate if we had the means, and we are almost there, day by day. Our beloved martyrdom is locked up there, atomic, in our suitcase, with our vanity."

This passage by Selin reveals his complex and somewhat rebellious view on the human condition and the constraints imposed by society. His use of vivid language and powerful imagery helps to convey his ideas in a very engaging way.

Io and Céline have a story that began more than thirty years ago. Andrea was sitting in the park of the library, a freshly rolled cigarette in his hand, his fingers already yellowed by nicotine. I was lying on him while reading Dostoevskij. I was in love as one can only be in love at twenty, in a totalitarian, inexplicable way that was unique only in my eyes. He was studying literature, was out of the ordinary, had brown Clarks even in July. And the wrinkled and dirty jeans, the hair over his eyes, the simple glasses, and his hands always on me. He was crazy about this book, underlining like a madman, shouting, declaiming, constantly interrupting me.

You already know how it continues, right? We broke up, overnight, and my hatred for Céline became equal to that for Andrea. For years, I would never have read that book, barricading myself behind the political aspect that everyone knows. For years, I kept it at a distance, thinking it wasn't for me.

I reached 46 years old and discovered that I joined the chorus. I have just finished a true masterpiece that perhaps I wouldn't have loved at 20, and certainly not as Andrea did. In this novel, there is, first of all, a quality of writing that I don't think I have found in any contemporary writer to Céline. And then there is the literature that tells life without discounts, there is cynicism, but there is also a lot of love and I believe there is one of the most beautiful goodbyes that I have ever read:

'To leave her, I really needed some madness, the ugliest and coldest kind. Anyway, I have defended my soul until today and if death comes to take me tomorrow, I'm sure I would never be as cold, hypocritical, vulgar as the others, because of that little bit of kindness and dream that Molly gave me during some months in America'.

This would have been enough, Andrea, to leave me as it should be.

If Celine had stopped his tirade around the 300-page mark, he might have held onto that elusive fifth star. However, as it stands, finishing his amazing yet horrible novel, which consists of ten thousand variations on the theme of human life being 95% unbearable misery, 5% boredom, and everyone smelling bad, becomes an exercise in readerly self-flagellation.

How many times do we need to hear this doleful message? Around 15 times per page. The industrial-strength vitriol keeps us awake, though. There's no nodding off with Celine.

This is the grand original of all those novels where guys rant and rage about how terrible everything is – it's a whole sub-genre. We have Philip Roth, a world-class ranter, William Gass, Michel Houellebecq, and Thomas Bernhard. When the unending, unedited stream of volubility is not as rancid and bitter because of being more drunk or stoned, it's there in Jack Kerouac's and William Burroughs' books. Will Self even wrote an article for the NYT saying he learned everything he knows from Celine. Catcher in the Rye is like a rich teenage Celine. It goes on - in the first section of Journey, the hundred pages that deal with World War One, you can clearly hear Catch-22 – he's the only one who realizes that everyone is trying to kill him. He knows it's not personal, but that really doesn't help.

"I reject the war and everything in it… I don't resign myself to it… I don't weep about it… I just plain reject it and all its fighting men, I don't want anything to do with them or it. Even if there were nine hundred and ninety-five million of them and I were all alone, they'd still be wrong and I'd be right. Because I'm the one who knows what I want : I don't want to die."

"But it's not possible to reject the war, Ferdinand! Only crazy people and cowards reject the war when their country is in danger…"

"If that's the case, hurrah for the crazy people! Look, Lola, do you remember a single name of any of the soldiers killed in the Hundred Years War? Did you ever try to find out who any of them were? No! As far as you're concerned, they're as anonymous, as indifferent, as the last atom of that paperweight, of your last bowel movement… Get it into your head, Lola, that they died for nothing! For absolutely nothing!"

Via a period skulking in a veteran's hospital, he gets discharged and signs up with a company running one of those colonial outposts in darkest Africa (Cameroon). He's in for a different onslaught of ghastliness, this time from nature with all its insect life and unpleasant diseases. He attempts to flee from the horror, the horror ™ and gets captured and sold into slavery on a galley ship, just like he might have in the second century BC. This was the part I thought didn't ring entirely true – galley slaves in 1917? Seriously?

Anyway, up to that point, Journey is a stone classic, wonderful and frothing at the mouth page after page, exactly the kind of thing you would froth about too. Here's one of my favorite Sayings of Ferdinand:

When you stop to think about it, a hundred people must want you dead in the course of an average day, the ones in line behind you at the ticket window in the Metro, the ones who look up at your apartment when they haven't got one themselves, the ones who wish you'd finish pissing and give them a chance, your children, and a lot more.

Then, with his brother galley slaves (!) (they also had sails on this boat), he reaches New York. His miserable existence improves greatly. He travels to Detroit and gets a job there. But he's still ranting about the hideousness of everything. He decides to go back to France and complete his medical studies and become a doctor. Still ranting, frothing, and badmouthing everything in sight,

Still further down, it's always the Seine, winding from bridge to bridge like an elongated blob of phlegm.

he becomes the poorest general practitioner ever and so bumbles along for the rest of the book, the same old sour-minded misanthrope we know and love by now,

My patients were mostly people from the zone, that village of sorts which never succeeds in picking itself entirely out of the mud and rubbish, bordered by paths where precocious snot-nosed little girls play hookey under the fences to garner a franc, a handful of french fries and a dose of gonorrhoea from some sex fiend.

There are a few anecdotes here and there, a few "characters" to entertain us (mostly unhinged), but no improvement in our guy's attitude to life even though his situation has improved from catastrophic to dire to scraping a living. He slouches and slimes his way around France, spewing forth maledictions and depressing maxims like an out-of-control I Speak Your Doom machine.

As for sick people, patients, I had no illusions… in another neighbourhood they'd be no less grasping or jug-headed or weak-kneed than the ones here. The same wine, the same movies, the same sports talk, the same enthusiastic submission to the natural needs of the gullet and the arse would produce the same crude, filthy horde, staggering from lie to lie, bragging, scheming, vicious, brutal between two fits of panic.

Are there any chinks of light at all? For a few pages, not more than five at a time, he hooks up with a woman and, blow me down, arch-cynic Celine serves us up not one but two examples of that most familiar of bit parts, The Tart with the Heart of Gold. That surprised me.

Well – fans of this book, and there are a great many, will disagree with me when I say that there is just TOO MUCH of it, and 99% of it is one long monotone, one endless screech. So, sorry, I have to say 4 stars only. But, you know, it's a hell of a book. Man!

How many psychological reserves do you have? This is what you should ask yourself before picking up this particular novel. No, it's not just a dull or heavy book. I've read quite a few such books and managed to handle them in one way or another. Here we are talking about the definition of pessimism, futility, and human wretchedness in every possible manifestation, with detailed descriptions page after page.

It wasn't a boring book. It had a big gap of events, most of which were biographical, and I can't tell you for sure exactly what percentage corresponds to reality. It was a disturbing book. Céline does exactly what the title says. He takes you by the hand, or sometimes pulls you by the hair, and you take a journey together into the night.

The hero of the book, Ferdinand, starts from Paris and is enlisted in World War I. The chapters where the events of the war are described are perhaps the most intense I've read, with clear anti-war feelings and a brave acknowledgment on the part of the hero of his absolute "cowardice": he wants to escape from the war at all costs, he wants to live. His life continues for a while in Africa, then in the United States of the Front, and finally ends up back in France as a doctor.

A cycle is Ferdinand's life, as the so revolutionary for the time opening sentence of the novel warns us: Ça a débuté comme ça (It started like this). I won't bore you with many analyses of the literary content. Briefly, with this phrase, Céline achieved two things: On the one hand, he caused a scandal by using in his writing words like ça, which were only used in spoken language, and on the other hand, he led the reader to the bad, dark cycle of life that he intends to tell him about.

There is no way out or window of hope from this life. People will not become better, life will not become better. And every day is another reminder of this undeniable fact.

"The worst of all is that you wonder how you will find the strength the next day to continue doing what you have been doing for so long, where you will find the strength for those stupid steps, the countless plans that lead nowhere, the attempts to escape from the oppressive need, attempts that always fail, and all of them to convince yourself once again that fate is inescapable, that you must fall back to the roots of the wall, every night, in the agony of that tomorrow, always more uncertain, always more miserable."

Taking a review of the novel that educated me as much as any, I finally find the courage to admit the truth. I couldn't get past the fact that the author was a fascist. A deeply anti-Semitic and pro-Nazi, he was forced to flee from France and seek refuge in Germany and later in Copenhagen, being accused of the ultimate treason. No, the fact that these beliefs do not appear in this book is not enough for me.

What actually made me even more furious is that I wonder how a person who has experienced the horror of war in his own life, has seen so much death, can decide to go to that side of the world.

Yes, Céline takes you to the deepest darkness because he carries it within him. And this is not easily bearable.

The moment of reading is decisive. The same book read years apart is no longer the same, just like a person or a place. Recently, I often think about "Voyage to the End of the Night" by Louis Ferdinand Celine. Reading it was not a stroll. Halfway between delirium and a philosophical treatise, with such hermetic steps as to be incomprehensible, it is one of those books that truly takes you from one place to another in your soul. Its author is the craziest and yet the most lucid in all of literature.

“Life is this, a shard of light that ends in the night.”

I suggest not bothering to seek a political reading of this work, but simply enjoying the flashes that run through it. There is a great deal of humanity in these pages, there is a carnal relationship with reason. The list of my underlinings shows all the surprise and wonder with which I read them.

“When one has no imagination, dying is nothing, when one has it, dying is too much.”

We all travel towards the end of the night, despite our vanity. In the book, there is all of humanity (and not just that of the 20th century).

A mountain.

A journey.

A death.

Soon I will write a note about this masterpiece.

The second time you read it, the new text appears before your eyes and shows its form.

Unique.

This story of a mountain, a journey, and a death holds a certain allure. The anticipation of writing that note about this supposed masterpiece is palpable. It's as if with each read, new details emerge, painting a more vivid picture. The form that it takes on when read for the second time is truly remarkable. It stands out as something one-of-a-kind, captivating the reader's imagination and leaving them eager to explore its depths further.

As I prepare to pen that note, I can't help but wonder what new insights and perspectives I will uncover. Will there be hidden meanings within the words, or perhaps a deeper message about life and death? Only time will tell as I embark on this literary adventure and attempt to capture the essence of this unique piece.