ISBN: 978-1-84749-041-4
First published in France as Mort a Credit in 1936, this followed Celine's debut, Journey to the End of Night. From the elevated point-of-view of an established Parisian doctor who finds himself specialising in treating the poor who rarely afford to pay him, we travel back to his childhood, upbringing, hustling for a living on the streets of Paris in the late 19th Century.
His award of the Prix Goncourt for 'Journey...' had led to near violent arguments in literary circles and between rival journalists, as it had ushered in 'a new kind of novel', writing in one or several colloquial voices about aspects of life that really hadn't existed in books before.
For the 'difficult second novel', Celine began on a series of semi-autobiographical works that emerged as one epic, taking us from his early days as the son of shopkeepers just one jump ahead of poverty in the bustling, throbbing backstreets of Paris, to their attempts at survival in England, his years as a boarder in an English boys' school and adolescence as the assistant to a mad inventor, publisher and entrepreneur .
As well as drawing deeply on his own experience of life, Celine added protagonists’ motivations directly influenced by his reading of Freud; and his deliberate jamming together of formal ‘novelese’ with very crude and colloquial phrases was bound to shock; as it did at the time of publication. He had long struggles with his publisher over many passages before they saw print, as Robert Denoel refused to print the most explicit parts and Celine refused to consider rewrites.
The translator, Ralph Manheim, has added a valuable introduction, where we learn that Andre Gide said Celine wrote not out of reality but of the hallucinations provoked by reality. True: every few pages, events meld into the emotions they give rise to so that they flood out of the book, crowds of writhing, yelling, bodies and shadows ripping through the story-line as they smash objects or attitudes.
Manheim has chosen to give the young protagonist the voice of Huckleberry Finn as played by James Cagney - to approximate French street style he has liberally mixed American and British english, so that men wear ‘suspenders’ not ‘braces’ but they sit on their ‘arses’. But after the kid’s schooldays in England his language noticeably becomes more ‘adult’. The translation is piled high with rich word-food but well-leavened with roughage, as I imagine (only being a school-book French reader) the original would have been.
The narrator has a tendency to suffer or enjoy delirious visions due to a war wound in the head, and this may cause him to see things as wild as he describes them - or is it Celine himself? Not many writers could have thought of that sea voyage over the rooftops of Paris. Here is just one scene:
This deep-sea-diving-bell contest was getting as wild as our perpetual motion runaround... Often they’d wake me up in the middle of the night with their screeching... A procession of nutters with their eyes popping out half a mile, ripping their shirts off outside the door, swollen, bloated with certainties, with implacable solutions... It wasn’t a pleasant sight... More and more of them kept coming!... They were blocking the traffic... A saraband of lunatics!...
There was such a seething mass of them in the shop - tangled up in the chairs, clinging to the junk piles, submerged in the papers - that you couldn’t get in when you needed something... All they wanted was to hang around and argue a little more, to bowl us over with some new and conclusive detail...
Be warned: You may feel that other novels are pale and grey after reading this. At least, Celines’ earlier novel is also published by Oneworld.
First published in France as Mort a Credit in 1936, this followed Celine's debut, Journey to the End of Night. From the elevated point-of-view of an established Parisian doctor who finds himself specialising in treating the poor who rarely afford to pay him, we travel back to his childhood, upbringing, hustling for a living on the streets of Paris in the late 19th Century.
His award of the Prix Goncourt for 'Journey...' had led to near violent arguments in literary circles and between rival journalists, as it had ushered in 'a new kind of novel', writing in one or several colloquial voices about aspects of life that really hadn't existed in books before.
For the 'difficult second novel', Celine began on a series of semi-autobiographical works that emerged as one epic, taking us from his early days as the son of shopkeepers just one jump ahead of poverty in the bustling, throbbing backstreets of Paris, to their attempts at survival in England, his years as a boarder in an English boys' school and adolescence as the assistant to a mad inventor, publisher and entrepreneur .
As well as drawing deeply on his own experience of life, Celine added protagonists’ motivations directly influenced by his reading of Freud; and his deliberate jamming together of formal ‘novelese’ with very crude and colloquial phrases was bound to shock; as it did at the time of publication. He had long struggles with his publisher over many passages before they saw print, as Robert Denoel refused to print the most explicit parts and Celine refused to consider rewrites.
The translator, Ralph Manheim, has added a valuable introduction, where we learn that Andre Gide said Celine wrote not out of reality but of the hallucinations provoked by reality. True: every few pages, events meld into the emotions they give rise to so that they flood out of the book, crowds of writhing, yelling, bodies and shadows ripping through the story-line as they smash objects or attitudes.
Manheim has chosen to give the young protagonist the voice of Huckleberry Finn as played by James Cagney - to approximate French street style he has liberally mixed American and British english, so that men wear ‘suspenders’ not ‘braces’ but they sit on their ‘arses’. But after the kid’s schooldays in England his language noticeably becomes more ‘adult’. The translation is piled high with rich word-food but well-leavened with roughage, as I imagine (only being a school-book French reader) the original would have been.
The narrator has a tendency to suffer or enjoy delirious visions due to a war wound in the head, and this may cause him to see things as wild as he describes them - or is it Celine himself? Not many writers could have thought of that sea voyage over the rooftops of Paris. Here is just one scene:
This deep-sea-diving-bell contest was getting as wild as our perpetual motion runaround... Often they’d wake me up in the middle of the night with their screeching... A procession of nutters with their eyes popping out half a mile, ripping their shirts off outside the door, swollen, bloated with certainties, with implacable solutions... It wasn’t a pleasant sight... More and more of them kept coming!... They were blocking the traffic... A saraband of lunatics!...
There was such a seething mass of them in the shop - tangled up in the chairs, clinging to the junk piles, submerged in the papers - that you couldn’t get in when you needed something... All they wanted was to hang around and argue a little more, to bowl us over with some new and conclusive detail...
Be warned: You may feel that other novels are pale and grey after reading this. At least, Celines’ earlier novel is also published by Oneworld.
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