Recommendations from our site
“This novel taught me, early on, about hyperbole … I took it as a lesson and challenge, about description, accuracy, truth, and the powers of exaggeration to produce humour.” Read more...
Rachel Kushner on Books That Influenced Her
Rachel Kushner, Novelist
“I was impressed by the fact that Paris was a real city and had this underground quality to it. There could be really deeply subversive people living and working and creating here. I was particularly fascinated by Céline’s portrait of the city because Paris is one of the characters in the book. You get a real sense of what Paris looked like. Céline walked everywhere. He was a mad walker. He came from the suburbs and he lived and worked around Clichy and Courbevoie. When I first moved to Paris I lived for a year not far from Place de Clichy and I found myself going to the same places and seeing the same kinds of scenes described in the late 1920s and early 1930s, and they really seemed to be current—people hanging out in cafés and drinking madly and living much of their lives in a public sphere, outside on the streets.” Read more...
David Downie, Travel Writer
