|
Showing 1 - 25 of
47 matches in All Departments
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 Celine'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 a young doctor in a working-class suburb
in Paris. Celine's disgust with human folly, malice, greed and the
chaotic state in which man has left society lies behind the
bitterness that distinguishes his idiosyncratic, colloquial and
visionary writing and gives it its force.
Death on the Installment Plan is a companion volume to
Louis-Ferdinand Celine's earlier novel, Journey to the End of the
Night. Published in rapid succession in the middle 1930s, these two
books shocked European literature and world consciousness.
Nominally fiction but more rightly called "creative confessions,"
they told of the author's childhood in excoriating Paris slums, of
service 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. Celine'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."
|
Death on Credit (Paperback)
Louis-Ferdinand Celine; Translated by Ralph Manheim
bundle available
|
R314
R260
Discovery Miles 2 600
Save R54 (17%)
|
Ships in 9 - 15 working days
|
When Celine'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 readers had never encountered,
ultra-realistic - and full of incidents that could not possibly be
true to life - and characters that stretched the imagination. In
Death on Credit, Ferdinand Bardamu, Celine's alter ego, is a doctor
in Paris, treating the poor who seldom pay him but who take every
advantage of his availability. The action is not continuous but
goes back in time to earlier memories and often moves into fantasy,
especially in Bardamu's sexual escapades; the style becomes
deliberately rougher and sentences disintegrate to catch the
flavour of the teeming world of everyday Parisian tragedies, the
struggle to make a living, illness, venereal disease, the sordid
stories of families whose destiny is governed by their own
stupidity, malice, lust and greed. This fascinating book by one of
the greatest twentieth-century novelists is an unforgettable
experience for the reader.
|
Castle to Castle (Paperback)
Louis-Ferdinand Celine, Louis C?line; Translated by Ralph Manheim
bundle available
|
R376
R305
Discovery Miles 3 050
Save R71 (19%)
|
Ships in 12 - 17 working days
|
With an undercurrent of sensual excitement, C?line paints an
almost unbearably vivid picture of society and the human
condition.
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.
|
London Bridge (Paperback)
Louis-Ferdinand Celine; Translated by Dominic Di Bernardi
bundle available
|
R406
R335
Discovery Miles 3 350
Save R71 (17%)
|
Ships in 9 - 15 working days
|
A major work by one of France's most important authors of the
twentieth century, London Bridge is a riotous novel about the
London underworld during the First World War. Picking up where its
predecessor Guignol's Band left off, Celine's narrator recounts his
disastrous partnership with an eccentric Frenchman intent on
financing a trip to Tibet by winning a gas-mask competition; his
uneasy relationship with London's pimps and whores and their common
nemesis, Inspector Matthew of Scotland Yard; and, most scandalous
of all, his affair with a colonel's daughter. Written in Celine's
trademark style - a headlong rush of slang, brusque observation and
quirky lyricism, delivered in machine-gun bursts of prose and
ellipses - London Bridge recreates the dark days during the Great
War with sordid verisimilitude and desperate hilarity.
|
Semmelweiss (Paperback)
Louis-Ferdinand Celine; Introduction by Philippe Sollers; Translated by John Harman
bundle available
|
R285
Discovery Miles 2 850
|
Ships in 9 - 15 working days
|
Louis-Ferdinand Celine (1894-1961) is best known for his early
novels "Journey to the End of the Night" (1932)--which Charles
Bukowski described as the greatest novel of the past 2,000
years--and "Death on the Installment Plan" (1936), but this
delirious, fanatical "biography" predates them both. The astounding
yet true story of the life of Ignacz Semmelweis provided Celine
with a narrative whose appalling events and bizarre twists would
have lain beyond credibility in a work of pure fiction. Semmelweis,
now regarded as the father of antisepsis, was the first to diagnose
correctly the cause of the staggering mortality rates in the
lying-in hospital at Vienna. However, his colleagues rejected both
his reasoning and his methods, thereby causing thousands of
unnecessary deaths in maternity wards across Europe. This episode,
one of the most infamous in the history of medicine, and its
disastrous effects on Semmelweis himself, are the subject of
Celine's semi-fictional evocation, one in which his violent
descriptive genius is already apparent. The overriding theme of his
later writing--a caustic despair verging on disgust for
humanity--finds its first expression here, and yet he also reveals
a more compassionate aspect to his character. "Semmelweis" was not
published until 1936, after the novels that made Celine famous. "It
is not every day we get a thesis such as Celine wrote on Semmelweis
" wrote Henry Miller of this volume.
|
Guerra
Louis-Ferdinand Celine
|
R557
Discovery Miles 5 570
|
Ships in 12 - 17 working days
|
|
Guignol's Band (Paperback)
Louis-Ferdinand Celine; Translated by Bernard Frechtman, Jack Nile
bundle available
|
R304
R250
Discovery Miles 2 500
Save R54 (18%)
|
Ships in 9 - 15 working days
|
Celine's third novel, first published in 1944 but dealing with
events taking place during the First World War, Guignol's Band
follows the narrator's meanderings through London after he has been
demobilized due to a war injury. The result is a frank,
uncompromising, yet grotesquely funny portrayal of the English
capital's seedy underworld, peopled by prostitutes, pimps and
schemers. Often considered to be Celine's funniest work, Guignol's
Band showcases its author's idiosyncratic style at its finest,
frantically blending slang, invective, onomatopoeia with literary
language, and bridging the gap between gritty realism and absurd
mysticism.
|
Fable for Another Time (Paperback)
Louis-Ferdinand Celine; Translated by Mary Hudson; Preface by Henri Godard
bundle available
|
R656
R548
Discovery Miles 5 480
Save R108 (16%)
|
Ships in 10 - 15 working days
|
"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
Celine'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--Celine 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 Celine (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). Celine
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. Celine 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.
|
|