Louis-Ferdinand Celine

When Céline’s first novel, Journey to the End of the Night, was first published in 1932, it created an instant scandal, being extravagantly praised by its supporters and savagely attacked by its horrified opponents. Four years later came the sequel, Death on Credit. Both were a new kind of novel, frank about the author’s thoughts and actions in ways that...

First published in 1932, Journey to the End of the Night was immediately acclaimed as a masterpiece and a turning point in French literature. Told in the first person by Céline’s fictional alter ego Bardamu, the novel is loosely based on the author’s own experiences during the First World War, in French colonial Africa, in the USA and, later, as...

Only edition in print The scene opens in a smouldering orchard in Flanders, where the French soldier Ferdinand, shell-shocked, badly wounded and surrounded on all sides by mud, corpses and destruction, tries to find his way to safety and make sense of what has happened to him since he lost consciousness. His hallucinatory wanderings eventually take him to the military...