(Book 648 from 1001 books) - Voyage Au Bout De La Nuit = Journey to The End of The Night, Louis-Ferdinand Céline

Journey to the End of the Night (1932) is the first novel by Louis-Ferdinand Céline. This semi-autobiographical work presents the antihero Ferdinand Bardamu. Bardamu's life is intertwined with significant events such as World War I, colonial Africa, and his time in the post-World War I United States where he works for the Ford Motor Company. In the second half of the novel, he returns to France, becomes a medical doctor, and sets up a practice in a poor Paris suburb, the fictional La Garenne-Rancy.

The novel not only tells Bardamu's story but also satirizes the medical profession and the vocation of scientific research. The various elements of the work are connected through recurrent encounters with Léon Robinson, a hapless character whose experiences mirror, to some extent, Bardamu's.

Published in 1932, this novel has had a significant impact. It was well-received by critics and readers alike. The author, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, was only 38 years old when he sent the manuscript of this novel for publication. His publisher compared him to Shakespeare and Dante. After its release, the novel achieved great success.

Journey to the End of the Night is a remarkable work that combines elements of autobiography and fiction. It offers a unique perspective on the human condition and the social and historical context of the time. It has won the "Nouveau" award and has been highly praised by Charles Bukowski, an American poet and writer, who called it "the best book written in the last two thousand years."

This novel is a must-read for anyone interested in French literature, the history of the 20th century, or the exploration of the human psyche. It continues to be relevant and influential today, more than 80 years after its initial publication.

There are mediocre writers and decent writers. Then there are the good ones and after that the very good ones. Finally, at the top, there is Céline.

I spent two months reading one of the most beautiful books I have ever held in my hands. An enormous effort, seriously. Every page is full of cynicism, the words chase each other between annihilation and comicality like no other author has dared to do. Blasphemous, provocative, immoral, dirty, depraved. But also moving and sweet, to the point of making you immensely sad. Céline mixes all this with absurd skill. A guy who was a doctor and then was exiled for anti-Semitism. A Nazi, too. But with the pen he is God. He seems to have passed through the earth to tell us poor idiots the truth about life. All the rest of literature in comparison is zero. A novel that causes scandal for what it says, for what it reveals. How things really are among men. Hypocrisy laid bare in its entirety.

Céline first went through the horrors of the Great War and the trenches of Flanders, then ended up in the African colonies. He was in New York and met the beautiful America of women and rich people as well as the ugly America of the assembly lines in Detroit. Finally, he returned to Europe, to Paris, in a time of crisis, to earn a living by throwing his existence on the outskirts of the French capital, among morally abject people and deprived of every material good. Céline, however, does not make concessions even to himself. The protagonist, Ferdinand Bardamu, is his image, his reflection. He often reproaches himself in his thoughts, but his actions always lead to an anti-heroic and humanly true behavior. Just think of the circumstances of courtesy. When you greet a person even if you really can't stand them or wish them a happy birthday. Céline says it. He says that men always do this, that theirs is a continuous lying to everyone, a persistence in behaving falsely, always, for all of life, until they realize that it is too late to remedy and they die. It is the scandal of people without God, without a homeland, without friends, without a wife, without a house, a family, a city of their own. It is human error both in the soul and in the body. We deteriorate, we get sick. There is nothing to be done. Only the choice of death remains. Because the world is horrible, and happiness quickly goes away. Even Bardamu knew it, happiness. In America, with Molly. And Céline leaves us a passage about it that is perhaps one of the most beautiful love passages ever written: "Good, admirable Molly, I would like if she can still read me, from a place I don't know, that she knew that I haven't changed for her, that I still love her and always, in my own way, that she can come here whenever she wants to share my bread and my furtive destiny. If she is no longer beautiful, well, so much the worse! We will manage! I have kept so much of her beauty in me, so alive, so warm that I still have enough for both of us and for me at least another twenty years, the time to reach the end. To leave her I really needed some madness, the ugliest and coldest kind. Anyway, I have defended my soul until today and if death, tomorrow, were to come and take me, I would not be, I am sure, ever as cold, hypocritical, vulgar as the others, for that little bit of kindness and dream that Molly gave me during some months in America." A passage like this should not even be commented on. It is not easy to intuit its importance, it is not immediate. The cultural yeast is evident only after having reread it three, five, ten times. Here it is, the immensity of Céline. The words that make him one of the greatest writers who ever existed. In the depth of the juxtaposition of these words.

At times delirious, the narration spreads over countless topics, until it practically touches all human emotions. The evocative power of the storytelling is surprising, because there is very little showing. Every environment seems evanescent, a mirage, something not very solid and poorly constructed, but in reality it is Céline's style that reaches the limit of the true, the known. When Bardamu is in Africa, there is a description of a sunset that is spine-tingling. You don't imagine that sunset much. But the description remains spine-tingling.

"I went back to find Molly and told her everything. To hide the pain I was causing her, she made a big fuss, but anyway it wasn't difficult to see that she had it. I was hugging her more often now but her sadness was a deep one, more real than ours, because we rather have the habit of exaggerating it. With the Americans it's the opposite. They don't dare to understand, admit it. It's a bit humiliating, but anyway, it's just pain, it's not pride, it's not even jealousy, nor scenes, it's nothing but the true pain of the heart and we must really tell ourselves that all this is lacking in us and as for the pleasure of feeling pain we are dry. We are ashamed of not being rich in heart and in everything and also of having anyway judged humanity lower than what it really is in the end." Beyond this cynicism anyone can notice a vein of hope, a rare sweetness of soul. The more nihilistic Bardamu becomes (just like Céline), the more the few passages where kindness shines through are delicate and unique. They make you feel tenderness. They give us back that little bit of joy that is left from such a morally negative reading. It is the simple portrait of man. After all, as Céline himself says: "The sadness of the world assails beings as it can, but it seems that it almost always succeeds in assailing them." Are we not ourselves a living proof of this?

The most ironic and comical part is paradoxically that of the war. Except for some moments of lucidity, it is never possible to really understand what is happening, except that Bardamu deeply hates the war, and at the beginning he even asserts that he cannot understand how the Germans, with whom he was talking quite calmly just a few months before, were shooting at him. "So no mistakes? That shooting at each other that they were doing, just like that, without even seeing each other, was not prohibited! That was part of the things that can be done without deserving a good scolding. It was even recognized, undoubtedly encouraged by serious people, like lotteries, engagements, hunting with dogs!... There's nothing to say. Suddenly I discovered the whole war. I was deflowered." Maybe not everyone knows that psychoanalysis was born just after the Great War. From the front came back soldiers half crazy from the horrors of death they had come into contact with, and somehow they had to be cured. Ironic, by the way, the fact that Bardamu also had mental health problems, following his war experience, and that he voluntarily lied to the doctors to avoid being shot. But then what is left for those who remain alive? A pointless dragging on, paraphrasing Céline. An aging and losing the opportunity to live as one should live. In the end, according to him, we are all carrion, useless sacks of flesh. Well, how can you argue with that. "The worst thing is that one wonders how the next day he will find that little bit of strength to continue doing what he did the day before and then for so long already, where he will find the strength for those stupid initiatives, those thousand projects that come to nothing, those attempts to get out of the oppressive need, attempts that always fail, and all to convince oneself once and for all that destiny is invincible, that one must always fall at the foot of the wall, every evening, under the anguish of the next day, always more precarious, more sordid. Maybe it's age that comes, traitorous, and announces the worst to us. One no longer has much music in oneself to make life dance, that's it. All youth has already gone to die in the world in the silence of truth. And where to go out, I ask you, when one no longer has a sufficient amount of delirium inside? The truth, it's an agony that never ends. The truth of this world is death. One must choose, die or lie. I have never been able to kill myself." Exactly, where do we find the strength to get up in the morning? Here Céline doesn't tell us, but I believe it comes from the people we are most affectionate towards. It is a hypothesis not contemplated in the world of Bardamu, where all human beings, apart from a few (among them Molly and Robinson), are mean, false and flattering, where nothing is pure. Man is rotten and continues to rot. There's nothing to be done. This work is the incarnation of nihilism.

"The egoism of the beings who have mingled in our life, when one thinks of them, as old people, is shown to be undeniable, that is, as if it were of steel, of platinum, and even more durable than time itself." In the end one could say that Céline says the same things throughout the novel, but with different words. It must be said that I did not expect the tragic ending that there was. I would have liked perhaps a positive awareness of the protagonist, but I was not satisfied. The whole narration is dotted with more or less dramatic events, like the episode of Bébert, which personally is the one that touched me the most. There was almost a tear. Incredible, given the cynicism with which Céline described everything. And yet I found a sadness and a sincere emotion in the middle of the very long negative periods. Maybe I'm too good. "Has anyone ever been seen going down to hell to replace another? Never. You can see that he throws him down. That's all." Don't you also read in these words, on the part of Bardamu, a crazy desire to be the one who would go down to hell to replace someone? He would do it, but he acts as a human being. He uses this argument a bit as an excuse. "It was only inside me that that happened, to always ask me the same question. I ended up falling asleep on the question, in my private night, that coffin, I was so tired of walking and not finding anything." Céline manages to tell us, with very few words, how much there is inside every man, how many questions we ask ourselves in life, perhaps forgetting them as soon as we fall asleep at night. It is of an infinite sadness. Which then, is exactly how we do in real life. Can each of us say with sadness that we would offer to die in exchange for someone else? A child perhaps. A stranger. Instead, in many cases, we would not even save those we love and who love us. Some would do it. Others not. We cannot know it except in specific circumstances. "It's just as well not to have illusions, people have nothing to say, everyone only talks about their own personal pains, you understand."

Many will be wondering where I want to go with this. Or they will be wondering if I don't intend to do anything but list the themes treated by Céline by reporting the necessary examples. I just want to tell you that this novel is a work of an abnormal scope, that reading it can only enrich you but at the same time also demolish your convictions. It is a hell to read it. Just a journey, as the title says. The night is the darkness that surrounds us. Human misery. And the book is precisely a journey to the borders of this misery. "We would burst if we had a little courage, we limit ourselves to decaying from one day to the next. Our favorite torture is imprisoned there, atomic, in our own skin, with our pride." Such a juxtaposition of terms would be worth not one, but ten Nobel Prizes. So many stupid scribblers have won that prize, but not Céline, Céline was anti-Semitic and so no Nobel. But here he is, among the immortals, brutally laying bare our inner and moral filth, telling us that man is only a contradiction on legs.