A nasty brutish and short book. But rewarding. The perils of war. We follow Ferdinand, a wounded soldier, as he is taken in and variously abused by nuA nasty brutish and short book. But rewarding. The perils of war. We follow Ferdinand, a wounded soldier, as he is taken in and variously abused by nurses and doctors. As he inhabits the tenuous zone of the infirmary, striking out periodically to escape an uncertain fate, he is haunted by the memories of his near-death experience and tortured by his persistent wounds. Full of the bravado and black humor the author is infamous for, without all of the ellipses he became obsessed with using in his later style, this work, which comes to us from beyond the grave, is a shattering death rattle. Makes me wonder if the Swiss academy, if they had read this book before awarding Céline the Nobel Prize, if they would have lumped him into the category of Pynchon - as they labelled that author too pornographic to win the prize. This may be Céline's most graphic work, but it's short length and fast pace will put the reader in mind of Ernst Jünger. His style is rollicking, intense and intimate. The highly personal internal monologue drives the action and contributes to an uncertainty in the main character's mental stability. I will always be a fan of Céline's eloquent tirades. For me, this was a page-turner. A surprise-a-minute thriller, lacking in literary pretension and startlingly honest in its depiction of warfare, no doubt compiled first-hand in the trenches, tromping through the meat and gristle of a war zone. Was Céline a hero or a coward, or simply a great artist forced to endure tragedy and pain? Did that pain forge his soul into a cynical machine for satire and psychological insight? Did it render him inhuman or more human? These are the questions the book is likely to raise....more
Another one-sitting read from Wakefield Press. A surrealist tale of an outrageous journey to Greenland. The author is deliberately inaccurate, inhumanAnother one-sitting read from Wakefield Press. A surrealist tale of an outrageous journey to Greenland. The author is deliberately inaccurate, inhumane and self-described as "gratuitous." The strange interjections, quotes and unconventional format mark it as an experiment piece, but it most engages on the level of subverting the reader's expectations of the purpose and value of travel literature. One might ask, why would someone write such a spoof of travel literature but to turn the whole prospect of learning about another culture on its head? Perhaps he is commenting on Imperialism, making his protagonist another race from his own, another race who has seen historical oppression, further obscuring the authorial motive by doubly imposing one oppressed force upon another. The Introduction breaks down his source material's original intent. This novella was heavily based on another account of a trip to Greenland. But instead of accomplishing anything spiritually satisfying, the protagonist here morphs into an unwholesome and weirdly insistent author of a false account of geographic and social conquest. Beneath the absurdist behavior is a backdrop of unforgiving wilderness and the bleak, unhallowed landscape of the human mind....more
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