Louis Ferdinand Céline Books In Order

Novels

  1. Journey to the End of the Night (1934)
  2. The Life and Work of Semmelweiss (1937)
  3. Death on Credit (1938)
  4. Guignol’s Band (1952)
  5. Castle to Castle (1968)
  6. North (1972)
  7. Rigadoon (1975)
  8. Conversations with Professor Y (1986)
  9. London Bridge (1994)
  10. Ballets Without Music, Without Dancers, Without Anything (1998)
  11. Fable for Another Time (2003)
  12. Normance (2009)

Plays

  1. The Church (2003)

Anthologies edited

Non fiction

  1. Celine Letters to Elizabeth (1990)

Novels Book Covers

Plays Book Covers

Anthologies edited Book Covers

Non fiction Book Covers

Louis Ferdinand Céline Books Overview

Journey to the End of the Night

The dark side of On the Road: instead of seeking kicks, the French narrator travels the globe to find an ever deeper disgust for life. Louis Ferdinand Celine’s revulsion and anger at what he considered the idiocy and hypocrisy of society explodes from nearly every page of this novel. Filled with slang and obscenities and written in raw, colloquial language, Journey to the End of the Night is a literary symphony of violence, cruelty and obscene nihilism. This book shocked most critics when it was first published in France in 1932, but quickly became a success with the reading public in Europe, and later in America where it was first published by New Directions in 1952. The story of the improbable yet convincingly described travels of the petit bourgeois and largely autobiographical antihero, Bardamu, from the trenches of World War I, to the African jungle, to New York and Detroit, and finally to life as a failed doctor in Paris, takes the readers by the scruff and hurtles them toward the novel’s inevitable, sad conclusion. .

Death on Credit

Death on the Installment Plan is a companion volume to Louis Ferinand C line’s earlier novel Journey to the End of Night. Published in rapid succession in the middle 1930s, these two books shocked European literatue and world consciousness. Nominally fiction but more rightly called ‘creative confessions,’ they told of the author’s childhood in excoriating Paris slums, of serves in the mud wastes of World War I and African jungles. Mixing unmitigated despair with Gargantuan comedy, they also created a new style, in which invective and obscenity were laced with phrases of unforgettable poetry. C line’s influence revolutionized the contemporary approach to fiction. Under a cloud for a period, his work is now acknowledged as the forerunner of today’s ‘black humor.’

Guignol’s Band

Guignol’s Band by Celine, Louis Ferinand

Castle to Castle

It is Germany near the end of World War II, the Allies have landed and members of the Vichy France government have been sequestered in a labyrinthine castle, replete with secret passages and subterranean hideaways. The group of 1,400 terrified officials, their wives, mistresses, flunkies, and Na*zi protectors including C line, his wife, their cat, and an actor friend attempt to postpone the postwar reckoning under the constant threat of air raids and starvation. With an undercurrent of sensual excitement, C line paints an almost unbearably vivid picture of human society and the human condition.,br Called by Atlantic Monthly ‘the blackest of the black’ of C line’s novels and hailed by the Washington Post Book World for its ‘intense sympathy with individual human beings,’ Castle to Castle is brilliantly rendered in Ralph Manheim’s translation, for which he won the National Book Award.

North

In this novel, Louis Ferdinand C line Journey to the End of the Night, Death on the Installment Plan offers us a vivid chronicle of a desperate man’s frantic flight from France in the final months of World War II. Accompanied by his wife, their cat, and an actor friend, our autobiographical narrator Ferdinand leaves Paris for Baden Baden a World War II hideaway for wealthy Germans, is then sent to a bombed out Berlin, and finally leaves for Denmark in search of the gold he had stashed there prior to the war. With the Third Reich in ruins and the Allied armies on Ferdinand’s heels, North combines documentary realism with hallucinatory images, capturing the chaos of war and its toll on both victim and victimizer.

Rigadoon

Completed right before his death in 1961, Rigadoon, the most compassionate of C line’s novels, explores the ravages of war and its aftermath. Often comic and always angry, the first person autobiographical narrator, with his wife and their cat in tow, takes the reader with him on his flight from Paris to Denmark after finding himself on the losing side of World War II. The train rides that encompass the novel are filled with madness and mercy, as C line, a physician, aids refugees while ignoring his own medical needs. C line’s inventive style and black humor profoundly influenced many writers who came after him, including Kurt Vonnegut, Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg and Charles Bukowski. As Kurt Vonnegut states in his introduction to this edition, ‘ C line demonstrated that perhaps half of all experience, the animal half, had been concealed by good manners. No honest writer or speaker will ever want to be polite again.’

Conversations with Professor Y

‘Here’s the truth, simply stated…
bookstores are suffering from a serious crisis of falling sales.’So begins the imaginary interview that comprises this novel. Professor Y, the interviewing academic, asks questions that allow C line, a character in his own book, the chance to rail against convention and defend his idiosyncratic methods. In the course of their outrageous interplay, C line comes closer to defining and justifying his poetics than in any of his other novels. But this is more than just an interview. As the book moves forward, Professor Y reveals his real identity and the characters travel through the streets of Paris toward a bizarre climax that parodies the author, the critic, and, most of all, the establishment.

London Bridge

In this widely acclaimed translation, Dominic Di Bernardi expertly captures Celine’s trademark style of prose which has served as inspiration to such American writers as Philip Roth, Kurt Vonnegut, William Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, Charles Bukowski, Norman Mailer and Joseph Heller. One of the last major untranslated works by France’s most controversial author, London Bridge is a riotous novel about the London underworld during World War I. Picking up where Guignol’s Band 1944; English translation 1954 left off, Celine’s autobiographical narrator recounts his disastrous partnership with a mystical Frenchman intent on financing a trip to Tibet by winning a gas mask competition; his uneasy relationship with London’s pimps and who*res and their common nemesis, Inspector Matthew of Scotland Yard; and, most scandalously, his affair with a baronet’s 14 year old daughter, an English angel whose descent into vice is suspiciously smooth. He dreams of escaping with her to America to start a new life, but he, his mystical partner, and his underaged mistress finally awake to reality crossing windswept London Bridge. Written in his trademark style a headlong rush of slang, brusque observation, and quirky lyricism, delivered in machine gun bursts of prose and ellipses Celine re creates the dark days during the Great War with sordid verisimilitude and desperate hilarity, expertly captured in Dominic Di Bernardi’s racy translation.

Fable for Another Time

Fable for Another Time is one of the most significant and far reaching literary texts of postwar France. Composed in the tumultuous aftermath of World War II, largely in the Danish prison cell where the author was awaiting extradition to France on charges of high treason, the book offers a unique perspective on the war, the postwar political purges in France, and Louis Ferdinand C line’s own dissident politics. The tale of a man imprisoned and reviled by his own countrymen, the Fable follows its character s decline from virulent hatred to near madness as a result of his violent frustration with the hypocrisy and banality of his fellow human beings. In part because of the story s clear link to his own case and because of the legal and political difficulties this presented C line was compelled to push his famously elliptical, brilliantly vitriolic language to new and extraordinary extremes in Fable for Another Time. The resulting linguistic and stylistic innovation make this work stand out as one of the most original and revealing literary undertakings of its time. Louis Ferdinand C line 1894 1961 was a French writer and physician best known for the novels Journey to the End of the Night 1932 and Death on the Installment Plan 1936. C line was accused of collaboration during World War II and fled France in 1944 to live first in Germany, then in Denmark, where he was imprisoned for over a year; an amnesty in 1951 allowed him to return to France. C line remains anathema to a large segment of French society for his antisemitic writings; at the same time his novels are enormously admired by each new generation.

Normance

A landmark event: The last of Celine’s novels to be translated into English, this account of an air attack on Paris during World War II shows a hallucinatory, altered space in which human aggressions, appetites, and suspicion come boiling to the surface in preposterous dimensions. A frantic narrator, in search of complicity, relates the story of an apocalyptic ballet that leaves reason and order in shreds, as bombing turns Montmartre into an underworld teeming with dirty deeds, while our guide resists the inhumanity with animal desperation and robust hilarity. Celine animates the events with the exuberance and speed of his narrative style, fully developed and uninhibited, and fully his own.

The Church

The Church, one of C line’s few dramatic works, was written in 1933, just one year after his great masterpiece Voyage au bout de la nuit Journey to the End of Night. The play is a highly satirical work that mocks almost all races and religions, typical, in part, of C line’s diatribes. Yet here also is a work of great wit, sharing C line’s great comedic tragic vision of humankind. One of the most noted writers of the 20th century, C line is also the author of Death on the Installment Plan, North, Rigadoon, Castle to Castle and Ballets without Music, without Dancers, without Anything, the last recently published by Green Integer. Also available by Louis Ferdinand C line Ballets without Music, without Dancers, without AnythingPB $10. 95, 1 892295 06 7 o CUSA

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