Death on the Installment Plan

First, let me ask you: have you read 'Journey to the End of the Night'? If the answer is yes (and if you liked it) then my response to you is go ahead and read Death. Death is very similar to Journey, only Death takes place earlier in the life of Celine/Bardamu.Plot (yes, there is one...kinda):The book begins with a grown Bardamu, practicing medicine in the suburbs of Paris. Soon the action flashes back to his childhood, which is what the rest of the book is about. Like Journey, this book follows the narrator as he moves around to various destinations, including a number of apprenticeships in Paris, boarding school in England, and a farm. There are developed characters besides Bardamu; there are his parents, his uncle, and (best of all) a crazy Inventor who takes young Bardamu under his wing.It was Bukowski who pointed me towards Celine. He praised Journey, but he said nothing about Death. Death was unavailable to me, and after I was done with Journey I tried to read Guignol's Band. I couldn't read it though due to the frequent incoherent streamofconscious rants (and perhaps because it wasn't a Manheim Translation). But then I moved and found Death on Credit (same...Credit is just the UK title, whereas it's installment plan in US), read it, and liked it even better than Journey. There are one or two short parts of surreal/hallucinatory sequences. Even those are short; 98% of the book I would describe as concrete events written coherently.Celine has changed his style a little with his second book. Ellipses are used much more often here than they were in Journey. But I found this to work quite well, both in terms of readability, and in terms of emulating actual speech and thoughts. Also, there are no chapters in Death.Every thing else is what you'd expect from Celine after reading Journey. The bipolar nature of the work--it will make you laugh, then twenty pages later you'll be crying. There's plenty of humor. There's plenty of sexual escapades. Plenty of other little adventures that you'll enjoy reading about. Oh yeah...also, there is less blatant philosophizing in this book. In Journey he'd go off on a rant about how people are terrible, and how society is evil, and how he believes in nothing. Don't worry! Those themes/ideas are all present here, he just doesn't come out and say it, rather, he shows them.So...if you've read Journey and liked it, I strongly suggest you read Death.If you haven't read Journey to the End of the Night, I suggest reading that first. It's not completely necessary. I think that you'll enjoy this book more if you've read Journey. Journey is perhaps the more readable of the two (at least the more traditionally readable). But if you want to read this and then do Journey be my guest, let me know how it goes.

This is the sequel to Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s autobiography Journey to the End of Night. This is not meant to be a complete blow-by-blow truthful account of his childhood. It’s too precise with long bouts of dialogue and wild abuse of ellipsis to fully make this a comprehensive chronological book. Say that it is emotionally accurate to the author’s growing up and trying to succeed in the slums of Paris around the turn of the previous century.The action often moves into fantasy and the style becomes deliberately rougher. Sentences disintegrate to hook the taste of the crawling world of the Paris slums. The sleazy stories of families whose destiny is ruled by their own stupidity and greed.I’m sure many people would become frustrated by this novel's bizarre style, dips into fantasy, and otherwise amoral tone, however it offers a profound vision of the nature of human existence for the socio-economically deprived, rooted in suffering and inertia. The book expresses ideas that stretch the limitations of perception while providing almost no structure to assign any meaning to life as a whole.

I got sick of this book about 200 pages into it and put it down. It was a couple months before I forced myself to pick it up again and finish the final 400 pages. I found it mildly interesting since it purports to be based on the author's childhood experiences.The introduction by the translator said this book was supposed to have 'black humor'. But I didn't detect much material that was reaching for humor. It was just endless histrionic monologues.If I shared the same the artificial values that bedevil the characters I might have found this book more engaging and poignant. But I have no use for the bourgeois values that drive the first half or the science values that drive the second. The title itself is a bourgeois concept, the installment plan. And the name the author chose for the shopping mall where his parents lived and where his mother had a clothing shop was Berasinas (Berezina), a famous French military disaster, which, in the French language, is synonymous with utter disaster to this day.One bright spot was the de facto anarchist group of children living out at the Cortial des Pereires farm in the second part. They lived with great carnal exuberance and freedom.Of course, many of Celine's non-monologue descriptions are beautiful and captivating. His 10-page rendition of a fever dream is nothing short of phenomenal.You have to wonder how Celine remembered all the detail present in this book, whether it was from memory or whether he kept detailed journals.I've never gotten around to reading his, "Journey", which I've heard is superior to this book. I'll have to make a point of it.

Read Celine in my youth and still re-reading. "Mort a Credit" is not as conceptually bright as "Journey," 1934, but it is still, despite being a bit dated, (1936), a hell of a roller coaster ride. Young readers should know where a lot of modernist energy sprung in the middle of the century - I talk mostly of Americans like Mailer, Miller, even Roth - each has ironically acknowledged indebtedness to Celine who is now discredited justifiably as an Anti-Semite. The book now reviewed has none of that. Every group and class takes a beating. He expressed a stern and unrelenting pessimism in the bleak period between the wars. His characters are largely from the Nineteenth Century Western Canon and are kind of memorialized as are those of Dickens and others. A recommended read if one is trying to understand France during the Great Depression and also an inimitable style feeding subsequent contributions.

My all time favourite book. Lost my paperback. Even better it a second time in English. Struggled with the original French but always a great book. No matter bardemu deals with he gets through.

I received the book in a good condition. And of course, Celine can never go wrong in expressing the misanthropic's existential dilemma.