Journey to the End of the Night

The author was a doctor. Louis Destouches treated the poor of suburban Clichy by day and wrote at night, and in 1932 he delivered a seven-hundred-page manuscript to publishers under his grandmother's first name, Céline. Gallimard hesitated; the smaller house Denoël read it overnight and signed it. The novel follows its narrator, Bardamu, through the war, colonial Africa, Ford's Detroit, and back to a medical practice in the Paris suburbs — roughly the author's own itinerary, rewritten as fiction.[1]

A prize scandal made it famous. The 1932 Prix Goncourt was widely expected to go to Céline; at the last minute the jury gave it to a now-forgotten novel called Les Loups. The Renaudot jury awarded Céline their prize the same afternoon, the press covered the scandal for weeks, and the book sold heavily on the outrage. The more lasting shock was the language: spoken French, slang included, used for serious literature for the first time.[1]

Its influence reaches from Henry Miller and Sartre to Vonnegut and Heller. It remains one of the century's most influential novels about war and disillusionment.[1]

Ferdinand Bardamu, a Paris medical student, enlists in 1914 almost on a dare and discovers within days what the war actually is. Wounded and decorated, he passes through hospitals and a military asylum, and is then shipped out to a French trading post in colonial Africa, where heat, fever, and corruption undo everything around him. Half-delirious, he leaves the continent on a ship bound for America.[1]

In Detroit he works the assembly line at Ford and meets Molly, a prostitute who loves him; he leaves her anyway, returns to France, finishes his medical degree, and sets up practice in Rancy, a poor suburb of Paris, treating patients who cannot pay. Through every stage of the book drifts Léon Robinson, a man always one step further down than Bardamu, who becomes entangled in a scheme against an old woman and is blinded when his own booby trap goes off in his face.[1]