Celine

Thanks for your account Fizzles I was just watching that interview again this morning and its very frustrating to watch the interviewer interrupt when the best approach could be to leave Celine to rant away - he seems to write as he talks and there is another interview found later where he does just that to the last question, to effect. otoh For me a gap was around his collaboration. I don't whether there was a clause or not pre-interview, or whether so much time has passed...

the additional bit about museums and countryside is lol to an outside, well to me, because you see in his manner, a congenital or pathological ferocious morbidity, that clearly precludes the happy experience of that sort of activity

For me this was more to w/his assertion at the beginning of his writing as an artisan/craftsman. It follows later on when he points to all those encyclopedias and is rather disdainful of that notion of looking them up and finding stories - rather he is a 'chronicler' (not a writer, a chronicler is a kid of artisan), and he wouldn't have time for encyclopedic novels like GR (probably the other great indirect account of WWII for me but in a completely different direction, they are not in conversation w/each other). Celine lives things, survives and tells us about them - and given how I dislike most encyclopedic fiction..

(Besides all that, countrysides (and I've only spend a little time in them) can be such unhappy places too, their vastness leading to these existential states (I was watching a film just last night which seemed to talk about this too so maybe I am giving this more attention than needed). The flipside of being confined in a cell is to have the whole world in front of you with no one immediately in it. I'll stop there...)

got a copy of Danube for three quid yay.

Hope to make my way into it soon - from the index there is a ton on Musil, Roth, Holderlin, Kafka..

Could be seen as a companion to this film, also a journey along the Danube (?)

http://icarusfilms.com/new2005/ist.html

hadn't heard about this... & (per the final paragraph) that his widow is still alive O_o

Louis-Ferdinand Destouches met Cillie Pam in Paris, at the Café de la Paix, in September 1932. Destouches was a physician who worked at a public clinic in Clichy treating poor and working-class patients; Pam was a twenty-seven-year-old Viennese gymnastics instructor eleven years his junior on a visit to the city. Destouches suggested a stroll in the Bois de Boulogne, took Pam to dinner later that night, and afterward took her home. Two weeks together began, after which Pam returned to her work and life in Vienna. Over the next seven years, they saw each other infrequently but corresponded regularly. Pam, who was Jewish, married and had a son. Destouches, who wrote in his free time, became famous shortly after their brief affair, his first novel, Voyage au bout de la nuit, published at the end of 1932 under the pseudonym “Céline” (his maternal grandmother’s first name), proving an enormous success. In February 1939, Destouches received word that Pam had lost her husband: he had been seized, sent to Dachau, and killed. On February 21, Destouches wrote to Pam, who had fled abroad:

Dear Cillie,

What awful news! At least you’re far away, on the other side of the world. Were you able to take a little money with you? Obviously, you’re going to start a new life over there. How will you work? Where will Europe be by the time you receive this letter? We’re living over a volcano.

On my side, my little dramas are nothing compared to yours (for the moment), but tragedy looms nonetheless….

Because of my anti-Semitic stance I’ve lost all my jobs (Clichy, etc.) and I’m going to court on March 8. You see, Jews can persecute too.

How a reader responds to this letter is, I suspect, a fair predictor of how capable he or she might be of tolerating the extreme disjunctions that predominate in the life and art of its author. One of Céline’s biographers, for example, describes the letter as possessing “a curious blend of concern and sheer tactless selfishness,” a response that itself seems to exhibit its own curious blend of sheer shortsightedness and apologism. Another biographer calls it, reasonably if inadequately, “astonishing,” but does offer the useful detail that Pam, upon receipt of the letter, “never saw [Destouches] again and stopped writing.”

(from here, a very good read imo: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2010/01/14/uncovering-celine/)

Yeah, v good piece - read it at the time.

Inevitably some of Céline’s greatest supporters have emerged from France’s far right. The website Egalité et Reconciliation, run by Alain Soral, a former member of the Front National, accused Bourdieu of “assassinating” Céline. It said Bourdieu and leading lady Géraldine Pailhas, who plays Céline’s wife, Lucette Almenzor, were part of a “champagne socialist” set who control French cinema and members of a “band of leftwing intellectuals … a tribe whose members can be found in almost all César-winning films. They are trophy collectors.”“A half century after the disappearance of the biggest French writer ever, it’s not useful, that a film realised by the son of a self-righteous thinker... should reduce Céline to his antisemitism,” it said.

:-(

Marie Darrieussecq serving up a fine endorsement for Damian Catani's forthcoming biography of Louis-Ferdinand Céline: ‘One of the best French writers ever, who re-invented the very language of literature, and a complete SALOPARD.’ pic.twitter.com/hMe4wc8RZk

— David Hayden (@seventydys) June 29, 2021

https://lithub.com/guerre-a-louis-ferdinand-celine-manuscript-once-thought-lost-will-be-published-tomorrow-in-france/

Reading it atm !

How is it?

I read Death on the Installment Plan during my first trip to London while staying in a youth hostel. I think I read Journey to the End of the Night on a subsequent trip, but I am not certain about this. That they are explicitly excluded in the question for this thread makes me think I should read further or revisit those novels again. (Celine seems right for London because he makes me think of a more miserable version of Baudelaire, which is all I could experience of the city at the time and perhaps forever.)

Well, I'm 2/3 in and it's... Celinien !
It's unfinished and reconstructed in parts so a bit inconsistent but so far it's a powerful, carnal, dirty and vibrant testimony to WWI.
And it's pretty short.

I had a version of Death on The Installment Plan translated by Billy Childish in the late 80s. I think that's what he called it and I do like that name and I think it is the one I first heard about the book under. Seems to be more evocative than Death ON Credit. the relentless drip of a thing hanging over one incrementally and all like that. I did think that name was older anyway.

I have had a couple of other titles by the writer but I think I only read part of them. THink I had both Castle To Castle and North. Given to me by the girlfriend of the guy from whom I used to buy the posters I sold.

"That they are explicitly excluded in the question for this thread makes me think I should read further or revisit those novels again."

Not for any reason other than that these are the books that most people would've read.

Aixtc - thanks for your post. Wonder if they'll get translated anytime soon.