He worked as an obstetrician and later in a public dispensary for the poor. The First World War-in which he was wounded while voluntarily undertaking a dangerous mission-freed him from this humdrum future he educated himself relentlessly and came out of the war determined to be a doctor. From a modest background, he was taken out of school early to work in trade, but he seemed unable to hold down jobs. What’s striking is how absent his grievous opinions are from his great novels where one can occasionally glimpse a gentle humanist buried beneath a bitterly stung idealism.Įverything that Céline became was an act of will. Céline, in short, is one of the great problems in twentieth-century literature: you find yourself irresistibly drawn in by the fearless singularity of his vision, even while aware of the appalling place to which it led him. He was decorated for bravery in the First World War, and wrote anti-Semitic pamphlets in the run-up to the Second, after which he was declared a national disgrace and imprisoned for collaborationist sympathies. He was a French writer largely remembered for his first novel “Journey to the End of the Night,” a loosely biographical work teeming with disease, misanthropy, and dark comedy. Céline is a great liberator.” Louis-Ferdinand Céline was born on this day in 1894. To read him, I have to suspend my Jewish conscience, but I do it, because anti-Semitism isn’t at the heart of his books…. “Even if his anti-Semitism made him an abject, intolerable person. “Céline is my Proust!” Philip Roth once said.
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