Here’s something that they don’t tell you when you poke around and learn about Celine – he’s really effing funny. Misogynistic, racist, a probable Nazi sympathizer (if not full on collaborator) yes – but also really funny. The horrors on WWI are on full display starting with chapter two, but the vibe I got is much more P. J. O’Rourke than Erich Maria Remarque.
The first 250 pages are a plotless screed as “Ferdinand” looks down his nose at war, then the homefront, then Colonization in Africa, then New York, then the Ford factory in Detroit, with nothing but scorn for society and its inhabitants – those disgusting humans. Ferdinand is not above it, though, loaded with semen and feces and the barbarous human need to expel both of these at regular intervals.
Finally a return to France and setting up shop as a physician in a low-rent part of Paris where the focus is more on the bottom line than Hippocrates. Here something resembling a traditional plot comes in with a cast of despicable characters all screwing each other, literally and figuratively, to pass the time. Ferdinand finds himself, at the end, the head of a local insane asylum, the only natural place to be.
Every page of Celine’s book is like a punch in the eye of horrible, humorous depravity – and endless bon mots. Snuck between the nihilism, usually in ellipses, are short phrases of remarkable beauty. Celine was a hero the Beats and it is obvious why – nearly everything he writes is quotable (I’d give you some examples, but then I wouldn’t know where to stop) and, surely, if spake with the right cadence (or French accent) will make you sound real, real deep.
A very entertaining, although ultimately depressing book.
