with a side of Celine

A few days ago, I finished Charlotte Mandell's French-to-English translation of Mathias Enard's Zone, which has several wonderful references to and anecdotes about Celine, and then, this evening I began Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five, and it takes me only to page 19 to find Celine once more:

My other book was Erika Ostrovsky's Celine and His Vision. Celine was a brave French soldier in the First World War--until his skull was cracked. After that he couldn't sleep, and there were noises in his head. He became a doctor, and he treated poor people in the daytime, and he wrote grotesque novels all night. No art is possible without a dance with death, he wrote.

The truth is death, he wrote. I've fought nicely against it as long as I could. . . danced with it, waltzed it around. . . decorated it with streamers, titillated it. . . 

Time obsessed him. Miss Ostrovsky reminded me of the amazing scene in Death on the Installment Plan where Celine wants to stop the bustling of a street crowd. He screams on paper, Make them stop. . . don't let them move anymore at all. . . There, make them freeze. . . once and for all! . . . So that they won't disappear anymore!

*Note: On Monday, between Enard and Vonnegut, I read and enjoyed Jean-Philippe Toussaint's Self-Portrait Abroad.

I Love Dollars

Aside from syllabus readings, I've had only a little bit of time to read on or off line. But one selection was the title story of Wen Zhu's I Love Dollars, which takes us inside contemporary money-mad, sex-crazed China where at least some young people are now interested in becoming writers and musicians.

I also stumbled upon, and then read, Michael Kazin's considerations of his father Alfred Kazin's life and writing, and I continue to support Cooke's fairly recent biography of Kazin, particularly for anyone with some time on their hands.

Last, I came across an article on Louis-Ferdinand Celine's antisemitism. I'd been under the impression that Celine was of that most curious caste of antisemites, that is, one born Jewish, but in fact, it seems I'm mistaken. I'm not sure of why I'd been under that impression or if I ever had a source. Now I find myself reading and skimming his interview from The Paris Review. Here's an excerpt:

My mother always used to tell me, “Poor kid, if you didn't have the rich people (because I already had a few little ideas, as it happened), if there weren't any rich people we wouldn't have anything to eat. Rich people have responsibilities.” My mother worshiped rich people, you see.

Here's one more, Celine on the novel as fighting a losing battle against TV, film, and alcohol:

But novels are a little like lace . . . an art that disappeared with the convents. Novels can't fight cars, movies, television, booze. A guy who's eaten well, who's escaped the big war, in the evenings gives a peck to the old lady and his day's finished. Done with.

some French Jews read Celine

According to an article published a few years ago in The Jewish Daily Forward, some French Jews continue to be fascinated with Celine. Here are two of the final paragraphs:

Decades later, other Jewish writers remain firmly fascinated by Céline, drooling or not. Parisian bookseller and writer Mikaël Hirsch, born in 1973, is a grandson of Louis-Daniel Hirsch, who served as Gallimard’s sales manager for more than half a century. The younger Hirsch’s 2010 novel “The Outcast,” out in paperback August 31 [from Les editions J’ai Lu], describes the true story of how, in 1954, Mikaël’s father, then working as a Gallimard messenger boy (he is renamed Gérard Cohen for the purposes of the novel), delivered printer’s proofs to Céline in Meudon, or what the novel calls “Célinegrad.” There, Céline’s “reprobate” status echoes with the young Cohen’s own feelings of exclusion for being too Jewish, or not Jewish enough, to please his compatriots.

 

Another French-Jewish author, Émile Brami, who is of Tunisian origin and once owned a Paris bookshop devoted to Céline, currently maintains a blog, “Le Petit Célinien,” and has also written studies on his favorite author. Last year, Brami produced a mystery novel, “Massacre for a Bagatelle,” published by L’Editeur and set in the murky world of collectors of Céline manuscripts and rare editions. Such books suggest that Céline is a permanent presence, albeit one incarnating for many readers the epitome of rabid hatred and prejudice, on the French literary landscape. Celebrate him or not, Céline is, for better or for worse — much worse in his case — here to stay.

Several years ago, I began Celine's Death on the Installment Plan but never finished it. I do hope to one day, along with Updike's Rabbit Is Rich and several other more recent "stuck in the middle" books. It was satisfying to read Malamud's A New Life in its entirety this summer, nearly 20 years after putting it down after 100 pages or so. 

For favorite books written by writers with somewhat rabid antisemitic tendencies (more than just the usual Jew joke), I'd go with Voltaire's Candide and Hamsun's Hunger. Those are the first two that come to mind. Alas, there's the taint of antisemitism and many other prejudices (misogyny, racism, etc.) in so much of the canon as well as many contemporary novels, even with a sense that most big-name publishers are far more "PC" in their tastes these days.

Winter, 1965 by Frederic Tuten

I enjoyed "Winter, 1965" by Frederic Tuten, which I chanced upon collected in the O'Henry Prize Stories 2016 and read in the library on a rainy morning this past week. Although it's a cliche for writers to write about the sad doubting lives of literary writers, it's also a cliche to criticize these same stories about writers. In any event, in the right mood, I'm a sucker for such tales, particularly if they have mention of critics past such as Philip Rahv while unpublished, alienated writers read Celine, fret, and ponder their future. 

It made sense that "Winter, 1965" would find me because in the few days before landing on it, I'd been mulling over the opening paragraph of Celine's Death on the Installment Plan: 

Here we are, alone again. It's all so slow, so heavy, so sad. . . I'll be old soon. Then at last it will be over. So many people have come into my room. They've talked. They haven't said much. They've gone away. They've grown old, wretched, sluggish, each in some corner of the world.

But for now, not yet old, I move along to other literary things.

Celine on people from our past

"He went on talking to me in the darkness, while I retraced the steps of my past with the sound of his voice as a charm with which to open the doors of the years and months and finally of my days, wondering where I could have run into this man. But I found nothing. No answer. You can lose your way groping among the shadows of the past. It's frightening how many people and things there are in a man's past that have stopped moving. The living people we've lost in the crypts of time sleep so soundly side by side with the dead that the same darkness envelopes them all."

~~ Celine, Journey to the End of the Night

Celine in Grays Ferry

"That year, I manned up and mainlined Celine’s 

Death on the Installment Plan and his Journey

To the End of the Night. After the first

Paragraph of Death, I knew there were risks

To reading further, but until I could finish all

One thousand-plus pages of these books, I

Didn’t leave the house."

~~ from "Grays Ferry" by Linh Dinh

Junk is fragile. . .

“Junk is fragile. I ruined tons of stuff, never on purpose. The thought of antiques still makes me sick, but that was our bread and butter. The scrapings of time are sad. . . lousy, sickening. We sold the stuff over the customer's dead body. We'd wear him down. We'd drown his wits in floods of hokum. . . incredible bargains. . . we were merciless. . . He couldn't win. . . If he had any wits to begin with, we demolished them. . . He'd walk out stunned with the Louis XIII cup in his pocket, the openwork fan with cat and shepherdess wrapped in tissue paper. You can't imagine how they revolted me, grown-ups taking such crap home with them.”

~~ from Death on the Installment Plan by Louis-Ferdinand Celine

draft in progress: over a hundred favorite novels (and novellas) not in order

      A Fan's Notes by Fred Exley

      The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon

Vineland by Thomas Pynchon

Brothers Karamazov by F.D.

The Wapshot Chronicle by John Cheever

Chump Change by Dan Fante

The Sell-Out by Paul Beatty

The White Boy Shuffle by Paul Beatty

Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? by Lorrie Moore

Moby-Dick by Herman Melville

Absalom, Absalom by William Faulkner

Light in August by William Faulkner

Hunger by Knut Hamsun 

Candide by Voltaire

Lolita by Nabokov

Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates

The Lazarus Project by Aleksandar Hemon

Nanjing Requiem by Ha Jin

War Trash by Ha Jin

The Joke by Milan Kundera

Petersburg by Andrei Biely

Envy by Yuri Olesha

Native Son by Richard Wright

Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger

2666 by Robert Bolano

Home Land by Sam Lipsyte

The Ice Storm by Rick Moody

The Music of Chance by Paul Auster

White Noise by Don DeLillo

Americana by Don DeLillo

End Zone by Don DeLillo

Libra by Don DeLillo

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway

A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway

Mr. Sammler's Planet by Saul Bellow

Herzog by Saul Bellow

Ravelstein by Saul Bellow

Humboldt’s Gift by Saul Bellow

The Ghostwriter by Philip Roth

I Married a Communist by Philip Roth

Caucasia by Danzy Senna

Native Speaker by Chang Rae Lee

Hard Times by Charles Dickens

The Mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy

A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens

The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot

Too Late the Phalarope by Alan Paton

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce

The Human Stain by Philip Roth

Mickelsson's Ghosts by John Gardner

Water Music by T. C. Boyle

World's End by T.C. Boyle

Budding Prospects by T.C. Boyle

Even Cowgirls Get the Blues by Tom Robbins

Another Roadside Attaction by Tom Robbins

Rabbit is Rich by John Updike

Rabbit at Rest by John Updike

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

The Nun by Denis Diderot

Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison

Television by Jean-Phillippe Toussaint

The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolano

The Sot-Weed Factor by John Barth

The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen

Revulsion by Horacio Castellanos Moya

Zone by Mathias Enard

Journey to the End of Night by Celine

Dreams from Bunker Hill by John Fante

Ask the Dust by John Fante

The Brotherhood of the Grape by John Fante

Outline by Rachel Cusk

Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata

Correction by Thomas Bernhard

Extinction by Thomas Bernhard

Camera by Jean-Phlippe Toussaint

The Bathroom by Jean-Philippe Toussaint

Concrete by Thomas Bernhard

Immortality by Milan Kundera

The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera

Old Masters by Thomas Bernhard

The Trial by Franz Kafka

The Castle by Franz Kafka

Confessions of a Lady Killer by George Stade

Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy

All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy

Independence Day by Richard Ford

The Lay of the Land by Richard Ford

The Chaneysville Incident by David Bradley

Middle Passage by Charles Johnson

Memory of Departure by Abdulzarak Gurnah

Afterlives by Abdulzarak Gurnah

Heaven by Mieko Kawakami

Wake Up, Sir! by Jonathan Ames

The Extra Man by Jonathan Ames

The Rings of Saturn by W. G. Sebald

A Bend in the River by V.S. Naipaul

Shame by Salman Rushdie 

I Served the King of England by Bohumil Hrabel

Too Loud a Solitude by Bohumil Hrabel

Firmin by Sam Savage

Mad Toy by Roberto Arlt

The Seven Madmen and the Flamethrowers by Roberto Arlt 

V by Thomas Pynchon

Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon

Billy Budd by Herman Melville

Benito Cereno by Herman Melville

Crime and Punishment by F. D.

The Possessed (Demons or The Devils) by F. D.

A School for Fools by Sasha Sokolov

The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton

Washington Square by Henry James

Sula by Toni Morrison

Their Eyes Were Watching God

A Separate Peace

My Antonia by Willa Cather

Giants in the Earth by O. E. Rølvaag

Run Me To Earth by Paul Yoon

White Mythology by W.D. Clarke

Mrs. Bridge by Evan S. Connell

The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears by Dinaw Mengestu

The Story of My Wife by Milan Fust

The Incorporation of Eric Chung by Steven C. Lo

Straight Man by Richard Russo

Wonder Boys by Michael Chabon

The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides

The Ice Storm by Rick Moody

Hating Olivia by Mark SaFranko

The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge by Rainer Maria Rilke

Fight for Your Long Day by Alex Kudera

Auggie's Revenge by Alex Kudera

A Hero of Our Time by Mikhail Lermontov

Fathers and Sons by Ivan Turgenev

The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane

A Passage to India by E. M. Forrester

All Quiet on the Western Front by E. Remarque

The Scarlett Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne

Roughing It by Mark Twain

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain

The Mysterious Island by Jules Verne

Ivanhoe by Sir Walter Scott

enough to eat

"A school that gave you enough to eat would go bankrupt . . . They've got to watch their step . . . I made up for it on the porridge, there I was ruthless . . . I took advantage of my strength, and I was even worse with the marmalade . . . There was a little saucerful for four of us, I gobbled it up all by myself, straight out of the dish . . . I did away with it before anybody could see what was happening . . . The others could gripe all they pleased, I never answered . . . why should I have? . . . You could have all the tea you wanted, it warms you, it bloats you, it's perfumed water, not bad, but it makes you even hungrier. When the tempest went on for a long time, when the whole hilltop roared for days on end, I dug into the sugar bowl . . . with a tablespoon or even my bare hands. It was yellow and sticky, it gave me strength . . ."

~~ from Death on the Installment Plan by Louis-Ferdinand Celine

their appreciation for fine work

"Rich people had lost all their refinement . . . all their delicacy . . . their appreciation for fine work, for hand-made articles . . . all they had left was a depraved infatuation with machine-made junk, embroideries that unravel, that melt and peel when you wash them . . . Why insist on making beautiful things? . . . That's what the ladies wanted. Flashy stuff . . . gingerbread . . . horrors . . . rubbish from the bargain counter . . . Fine lace was a thing of the past . . ."

~~ from Death on the Installment Plan by Louis-Ferdinand Celine

kept busy at any price

"My parents were perfectly satisfied. I didn't need money, they kept telling my uncle . . . I'd only put it to bad use . . . It was much more important that I shouldn't live with them anymore . . . That was the unanimous opinion of the whole family, of the neighbors too, and of all our acquaintances . . . that I be given something to do, no matter what! that I be kept busy at any price! no matter where, no matter how! As long as I wasn't left idle! and kept away! From one day to the next, to judge by the way I had started out, I might set the Passage on fire! That was the general sentiment . . ."

~~ from Death on the Installment Plan by Louis-Ferdinand Celine

that's business for you

"He didn't go for lawyers and headaches . . . With this little spot of cash he was going to buy some simple straightforward business . . . something in the mechanical line . . . a going concern . . . repairing small cars . . . second-hand jalopies . . . That's always a profitable deal . . . In addition he'd take back his customers' lamps and horns . . . that was down his alley . . . He'd modernize them . . . There's always demand for little nickel and copper accessories . . . All you've got to do is keep up with the styles . . . You fix them up . . . and then you find a customer good for a three hundred percent profit . . . that's business for you! . . . He wasn't worrying . . . He knew all the tricks . . ."

~~ from Death on the Installment Plan by Louis-Ferdinand Celine

portrait of celine with frozen penny

Two from Celine

Both of these are from Journey to the End of the Night:

"The sadness of this world has different ways of getting to people, but it seems to succeed almost every time."

and

"A poor man in this world can be done to death in two main ways, by the absolute indifference of his fellows in peacetime or by their homicidal mania when there's a war."

other writers' Slovaks

And, finally, near the end of Journey, Celine arrives at his Slovak beauty, a far cry from the meth-infested psychotic "no-neck Slovak" of Robert Stone's "Helping":

Quite a few fine-looking girls applied for the job. In fact, so many strapping young women of all nationalities flocked to Vigny as soon as our ad appeared that we were hard put to it to choose among them. In the end we picked a Slovak by the name of Sophie whose complexion, energetic yet gentle bearing, and divine good health struck us, I have to admit, as irresistible.

In my imagined, or real, life of a Czech Kudera passing as a Slovak Soska (my father's father's true last name), my first literary sighting of any characters from the old country was late in high school and concerned the Czech girls on the American plains of Willa Cather's My Antonia, a book I remember enjoying very much. And, of course, Stone's "Helping" remains a favorite story nevertheless or because of its Slovak grace and wit.

As is our habit at L.U.S.K., we'll leave it to the next blogger to deconstruct the false binarism between the essential Slovak and constructed Czech in every man, neck or no.

Nobel Prize?

"I've got an idea! . . . suppose they gave me the Nobel Prize? . . . It would help me fine with the gas bill, my taxes, my carrots . . . but those cocksuckers up there won't give it to me! or their King! . . . they give it to every conceivable nance . . . to the worst vaseline-asses on the planet . . . naturally!"

~~ from Castle to Castle by Louis-Ferdinand Celine

a little more to eat

"To get a little more to eat, I did a little sleight-of-hand in the shops . . . They thought I was so simple they never suspected my tricks . . . I put on the innocent mischief act, I disappeared . . . I played peekaboo with Jongkind behind the posts and counters. I snitched a little sausage, an egg here and there, a few crackers, a banana or two . . . just a few odds and ends . . . Nobody ever bothered me . . ."

~~ from Death on the Installment Plan by Louis-Ferdinand Celine

the sweet gentleness of Europe

"I was a little shaken . . . in fact, I'd had rotten shock! . . . that's right, a shock . . . the whole of Europe on my ass . . . yes, the whole of Europe . . . plus my friends . . . my family . . . all competing to see who could grab more away from me . . . not leaving me time to say boo . . . my eyes! . . . my nose! . . . my fountain pen . . . the ferocity of Europe! . . . the Nazis were no lovebirds, but don't tell me about the sweet gentleness of Europe . . . I'm not exaggerating . . . that little warrant . . . and all those public prosecutors . . ."

~~ from Castle to Castle by Louis-Ferdinand Celine

the Journey

"What's all the fuss about . . . It's the Journey that got me into all this . . . My most relentless persecutors date from the Journey . . . Nobody's forgiven me for the Journey . . .  It was the Journey that cooked my goose . . ."

~~ from Castle to Castle by Louis-Ferdinand Celine

Zone by Mathias Enard

I've been reading Zone by Mathias Enard, tired sometimes and spacing out, but always some vivid description or series of incisive fused sentences (indeed) lures me back in. I'm experiencing it mainly as anti-war / anti-genocide and with some great literary references and anecdotes. Almost all of these, for better or worse, are to 20th Century European or American literature, but they are some fantastic ones, from Celine to the Beats and beyond.

So I recommend the book. It seems deserving of as many readers as Bolano, Knausgaard, and recent others from Europe whose longer works sold well in the states, yet the poor guy cannot even get a Wikipedia entry going.