Journey to the End of the Night
Louis-Ferdinand Céline · 1932
A first-person picaresque through WWI, Africa, Detroit, and Paris that destroyed genteel French prose. Celine invented a raw, slangy, furious voice in 1932 that influenced Beckett, Miller, and Kerouac. Le Monde ranked it sixth. Morally appalling author; extraordinary novel.
The case against
Céline's misanthropy is total, and totality gets monotonous: five hundred pages of bile aimed at everyone, with the African and Detroit episodes sagging once the war chapters end. The women are receptacles or saints. And the man holding the pen spent the next decade producing some of the vilest antisemitic pamphlets in French letters; the voice you admire is his.
Literary Fiction · the Pro canon
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
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