A review by kikiandarrowsfishshelf
Journey to the End of the Night by Louis-Ferdinand Céline

5.0

In the spirit of Celine’s book I will try to curse in this review. I think he would approve.

Well, shit.

The bastards are out to get you.

The question is, which bastards.

This book, this stream of piss, is just like piss. No, really it is because we all need to piss, right? You go to the doctor if you can’t. That’s like this book. You’re not going to want to read this book. You’re going to cock that eyebrow and shake that head. The words racist and sexist are going to dump from your mouth when you discuss Celine. You will say, correctly, that the world is a depressing enough place already, and you really don’t want to increase the dosage of your happy pills again.

All that will be true.

But you should read this book. Because it tells you, strangely and in a depressing way, that you are not alone. It also contains pearls of wisdom like:

“Dogs look like wolves when they’re sleeping” (106).
“Love is harder to give up than life. In this world we spend our time killing or adoring or both together” (59).
“The rich don’t do evil themselves. They pay” (287).

Celine writes at one point, “The best thing to do when you’re in this world, don’t you agree, is to get out of it” (49). He’s not advocating suicide (and neither am I), but let’s be honest, we’ve all felt this way. Getting out of it can even mean going to Mars. See, this book is about the human condition, but the internal human condition, the dark night of the soul in reality, the side we don’t let people see, that we rarely talk about, the fucking black dog that Churchill walked.

What the hell, just read it and get drunk afterwards.