Louis-Ferdinand Céline
Viaggio al termine della notte

I would never have written this review if I hadn't become passionate about this novel during my university studies; some of the concepts that inspired me to look at Céline's book critically, I actually assimilated from the critical texts of Paolo Tamassia in the volume edited by Lionello Sozzi, "Storia della letteratura francese," and from the critical presentations of Ernesto Ferrero, curator of the Italian translation, both in the audiobook of the novel itself and within the Corbaccio edition.

Charles Bukowski knew well who Louis-Ferdinand Destouches was when he named this Parisian doctor as one of his main influences, as well as one of the literary personalities he loved the most. Céline, he called himself. As Ernesto Ferrero pointed out, it was not his real name but that of the intrepid grandmother he greatly loved and who perhaps partly inspired him to create the character of the old mother-in-law Henrouille, so energetic in her old age as to almost brush against the very idea of immortality. Born in a suburb of Paris in 1894, he was 38 when this novel came out, but it already seemed he had lived an entire lifetime and that there was nothing left to explain to him about life itself. "God had created him to cause scandal," said Bernanos. And perhaps he was not entirely wrong.

Céline prepared himself in his own way for this challenge. He read a lot, but more importantly, he listened a lot. As Ernesto Ferrero wrote, even at the time of the humorous tale "Des Vagues,” in 1917, he was carrying forward his intense activity as a reader and observer of reality; there was not a single dialogue that escaped the attentive ears of young Louis-Ferdinand, regardless of his social class. And so, letter after letter, word after word, the writer tore out his guts to spill them in that marvelous 900-page typescript, which was sent to the publisher Robert Denoël in April 1932. The surprise was immediate as was the enthusiasm. The novel was published that same year and was awarded the Renaudot Prize, without his publishing house being able to find even a single term to define it properly.

A book with an enigmatic title, "Journey to the End of the Night." The journey of the protagonist Ferdinand Bardamu, from patriotic soldier at the front in the Great War to doctor for the poor in the most degraded suburbs of the capital, but also the journey of the reader in these pages as dark as they are illuminating, just as the journey of any other man on this infamous world, so fascinating in its twilight landscapes and yet constantly threatened by degradation.

An extraordinary contemporary anti-epic, an indescribable journey that, in one swoop, chapter after chapter, faces head-on all the great evils of the century in which it was written, getting its hands dirty in the trenches of the Great War, suffering with the beaten blacks in a colonial Africa that feels increasingly abandoned by the motherland, outraged by the petty rivalries of the medical and academic world, hiding in an American reality of which it seems impossible to become an integral part and satisfy one's desires, covering one's eyes amid the madness of an increasingly violent and corrupted urban decay, alienating oneself, swallowed in the game of Fordism and its grotesque assembly line, sneering at the stupid hypocrisy of a sophistic patriotism that is an end in itself, driven more by the economy than by heroism, just like the consumerist morality and romantic sentimentality that is an end in itself, but also moving in those acts of generosity hidden right in the heart of those you would never expect. All this, always with the sensation of being constantly pursued by an oppressive shadow: that of death; physical disintegration, as well as moral, of a body that, as Paolo Tamassia wrote, seems to be nothing other than a fragile shell; it is the shell of our fears, always ready to be crumbled and shattered, externally by war and internally by disease.

A simply revolutionary work that dismantled every certainty of the false and hypocritical bourgeois class of the time, already in its language, even before its content. Forbidden was the academic French, the formal, composed, and polite language of 19th-century writers. Céline's book reeked of real life, of everyday speech. As Paolo Tamassia noted, it was a language that was not simply transcribed but rather deformed to fit the tone of the narration; many writers before him had used the spoken language in their novels, but none, like Céline, managed not only to extend it to the entire work but also to transform it into a veritable music for the soul. A chant that hid both the suffering for the common destiny of death and the cutting irony with which to face the rot of life. A language that transcended the words themselves, almost as if it were more a dialogue with a reader who, in the end, was not very different from the narrator himself.

A book capable of analyzing all the absurdity of the 20th century only to disassemble it piece by piece, with dizzying content richness, steeped in a language that immerses us completely in the labyrinths of words. All this despite a continuous and thunderous laugh, a gritting that inevitably turns into a sneer, in a mixing of registers that makes the work the perfect example of how the most powerful comedy can emerge precisely from the inescapably tragic, in a synthesis of opposites that lays bare the true grotesque essence of our human life.

One of the greatest masterpieces of French literature of all time, just as it was before him for the great novels of Flaubert, Zola, Maupassant, Proust, or Gide. A work of a caliber difficult to reach, painted by a writer we could define as of superior level. To be read absolutely at least once in a lifetime, and then jealously guarded, allowing it to accompany us in our own, personal journey to the end of the night.