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A review by robdabear
Journey to the End of the Night by Louis-Ferdinand Céline
4.0
I find it troubling to choose a few words to describe this book without simply resorting to the term "brutal." Indeed, this is, in ways, a very brutal book, almost so much so that I took a long hiatus from reading in avoidance of soaking in its bitter, misanthropic spirit. Nevertheless, what Celine, this odd, tarnished French author, has done in "Journey to the End of the Night" is craft a novel in the most traditional sense while imparting a viscerally scathing review of "modern" humanity in its darkest, most sinister preoccupations.
I'll spare any further verbosity. Our narrator, Ferdinand, is at times hard to follow with his ranting and rapid change of scenery and disposition, and yet here and there, perhaps on every other page, there is a passage of that aforementioned brutality that reflects in some sort of honest realization - the kind of feeling of release you get when someone says what everyone in the room was thinking, but was too afraid to say for fear of sounding evil - I admit that my style of reading doesn't spend too much time dwelling on each of these passages individually, but as a whole, added with the odd and terrible cast of characters and the satirical and often bitter references in names and places by the author, I think "Journey..." is a book I will likely return to, perhaps when the Night seems to be too much.
I'll spare any further verbosity. Our narrator, Ferdinand, is at times hard to follow with his ranting and rapid change of scenery and disposition, and yet here and there, perhaps on every other page, there is a passage of that aforementioned brutality that reflects in some sort of honest realization - the kind of feeling of release you get when someone says what everyone in the room was thinking, but was too afraid to say for fear of sounding evil - I admit that my style of reading doesn't spend too much time dwelling on each of these passages individually, but as a whole, added with the odd and terrible cast of characters and the satirical and often bitter references in names and places by the author, I think "Journey..." is a book I will likely return to, perhaps when the Night seems to be too much.