“I usually have a stack of books on my bedside table, but the one on top currently is Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s first novel, ‘Journey to the End of Night.’ Céline (1894-1961) was a notorious anti-semite who, if he did not collaborate with the Nazis, at least fled with them from France. But he wrote at least two masterpieces of world literature, ‘Journey to the End of Night’ and ‘Death on the Installment Plan.’
“‘Journey’ is a picaresque tale of a World War I veteran, Bardamu, who just wants to survive the trenches of the war, then travels to Africa, New York City, the Ford plant in Detroit, and, finally, back to Paris, where he serves as a doctor in a poor neighborhood. Bardamu is a voluble, wily, acerbic, funny scoundrel who is driven, he doesn’t know why, to wander from place to place. He doesn’t much like what he sees, especially of human behavior so often, in his words, ‘crummy.’
“Even so, he occasionally meets good people who shame him and whom he cannot explain: Alcide, a friend he meets in the French Congo who undergoes the torture of living there to help pay for the education of his orphaned niece; and Molly, an American lover ready to love him forever, something Bardamu can’t fathom.
“Why would I read such a book? Because Kurt Vonnegut wrote an essay praising Céline’s work. Céline, he says, forever freed all writers from the slavery of being polite and ‘gave us in his novels the finest history we have of the total collapse of Western civilization in two world wars, as witnessed by hideously vulnerable common women and men.’
“This book, because of its dark humor and impoliteness, has made me laugh and weep. And, I’m not quite sure why, better able to face the darkness of our times.” —FRANK FREEMAN, Saco
Mainers, please email to tell us about the book on your bedside table right now. In a paragraph or two, describe the book and be sure to tell us what drew you to it. We want to hear what you are reading and why. Send your selection to pgrodinsky@pressherald.com, and we may use it as a future Bedside Table.
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