Journey to the End of the Night

Céline’s revulsion at the idiocy and hypocrisy of society bursts from every page of this novel: Journey to the End of the Night is a literary symphony of cruelty and violence. The story of the improbable travels of the petit-bourgeois (and largely autobiographical) antihero, Bardamu—from the trenches of WWI, to the African jungle, to New York, to the Ford Factory in Detroit, and finally to life in Paris as a failed doctor—takes the reader by the scruff as it hurtles to the novel’s inescapable conclusion. Ralph Manheim’s pitch-perfect translation captures the novel’s savage energy, while a dramatic afterword by William T. Vollmann echoes Céline’s volatile style and gives the reader a dynamic, fresh perspective on the fury of this astonishing novel.