Recommendations from our site
“The novel is the story of his youth and young adulthood as a child of a struggling lower-middle-class couple who never quite reach economic or social security…Celine’s novel combines immersion in the narrator’s consciousness with a thoroughgoing attack on every aspect of modern life. This negativity is an important dimension of modernist writing. Each modernist discovered their voice, discovered what they loved to write about, by first discovering what they hated. Celine pushes this tendency to its absolute limit. Critics have compared his short sentences, separated by the trademark three dots, to machine gun fire railing against bourgeois hypocrisy, the self-satisfaction and complacency of interwar Europe, the idiocy of public opinion, the vacancy of popular taste, and the grinding of urban poverty.” Read more...
Michael Clune, Literary Scholar
