I was interested to read some Celine after reading a Roberto Balano quote describing Celine as “a great writer and son of a bitch.” I had heard things about Celine’s troubled body of work and was doubly interested by the thorn he seemed to represent in the side of french literature. I feel obscenities are and have always been at home in much of french literature, but Celine seems to be an obscenity in the context of obscenities. His book I read, Journey to the End of the Night, is a wandering path around a WWI and post-WWI western world. It’s equal parts beautiful and unnerving. Celine always writing with a sense of unrest which sizzles on your frontal lobe as he complains about the most abject things. He takes no part in literary culture of the day, working as a Doctor, both in real life and in his fictional world, which parallels many of his real life experiences. Unlike the surrealists who are upset on a bourgeoisie level, Celine is disgusted, throughout most of the novel, with things he finds on all levels of existence. The dirty poor, the detached bourgeois, hungry immigrants, clinging housewifes, and, especially, the middle class are all pummel with Celine’s cynical but cutting remarks that slice across the public’s sense of dignity like a box cutter, opening up the manicured skin to reveal the dark emptiness inside our bitter bug like existence. Celine’s character is an educated man, troubled by the typical death of meaning that france as a whole had been undergoing, but the violence and quiet organized slaughter of WWI unhinges his decency which he before had tried to keep in check. Seeing the world during WWI, for Celine, is the sobering act which kicks off the novel. He then winds his way back into society, eager to escape the horrors of war. He first ends back in Paris where he dates an American woman who is happy to do her part in the war by baking sweets for the troops, a gesture which Celine sees as equal parts egotistical and delusional. He has a mental break in Paris ending up in a sanitarium, but plans to get away from France as a whole, heading to the African colonies. He ends up somewhere in central Africa where he sees the poverty of the indigenous and the brutality of the french. Celine holds no punches when describing the shabby living situation and intellect of the locals, but the French, everyday shopkeepers in and priests in addition to political or military authorities, are depicted as savagely brutal despite their wealth. Celine’s character has a lot to say with how awful everything in Africa is and pretty quickly catches a boat to New York where American capitalism is at large. The people to him are detached, love to work, and are killing themselves to do so. He moves to Chicago where he works like a dog and falls in love with a prostitute. By this time in the story probably the narrative thread starts to form: Celine’s character’s friendship with a Robbinson, a man who he knew both in Africa, the war, and now finds in Chicago. Robbinson is sick with the same sort of unrest that Celine has, but is a little poorer, has bad health, and less luck with women. All in all, Robinson seems to represent the other side of the same coin as Celine, but giving us a fictional character to move the story along. Celine’s narration is the real star of the story throughout. He makes observations that are so severe that they at once convince and disgust the reader. And, while not all of his criticisms stand up on reflection, he does a good job of poking a fork in the side of modernity. The book is only modern to a point. The style really feels more rooted in the tired spittle laced conversation, disgusted with the world and how, when you don’t think you can take another punch, someone, something, will always take another swing to put you to trial. By this point in the story though, Celine’s character goes back to Paris, gets his doctorate, and begins work in a poor neighborhood in Paris. He himself is poor, can’t get work, and sleeps very little. He meets lots of characters and, as a doctor, gets to see the neighborhood at its basest. Two particularly important plot lines are a mother whose son gets sick and Celine, no matter who he consults (and experts are the least helpful), can’t cure, leading to his eventual death, and, secondly, a husband and wife where the wife is trying to kill off her mother-in-law for fear that she’ll cost them too much money by staying alive, living on their property. Eventually, Robinson ends up getting hired to kill said mother-in-law, but botches the whole thing, ending up blind. I don’t feel the need to go through every plot beat up till the end, but these stories drift in and out of relevance, always leaving room for Celine’s observations to crackle. I imagine much of this book was laid out in a way that allowed Celine to make a story of his life while still keeping things interesting and novelistic. In this approach I think there’s a journalistic quality that feels authentic when compared to some stories with characters and places known less intimately then what Celine gives us here. I think you can also see he genuine opinions here, giving the narrative a spiritual muckraking quality where we can see a human scarred by the modern world (war, consumerism, imperialism) and how these scars continue to bleed and scab within the psyche of someone who’s writing, perhaps, as an exorcism. You can’t help but feel some pity for Celine’s worldview, but I think by the end of the book there’s some sense of peace within Celine’s unrest. This, however, leaves us unnerved, knowing that Celine became a strong anti-semite during the rise of the nazis. Whatever solutions Celine saw himself as having by the end of the 30s cannot be our solutions today. In that sense, Celine’s unrest can be seen in politics throughout America and keeping us up through this long night.