Death On The Installment Plan - Louis-Ferdinand Céline (Full Audiobook, Part 1 of 3)

"A book," as I have heard it aptly described, "for optimists who wish to be cured." Céline's mordant, sprawling, bitter, infuriating and paradoxically funny masterpiece, the follow-up and companion piece to his immortal Journey to the End of the Night. "According to those in a position to know," posits Robert Allerton Parker, translator of 'Mea Culpa' and 'The Life and Work of Semmelweis', "this second novel is even more impressive than the first, more profound, more daring, more shocking, and more penetrating in its exploration of life." A book, declares M. Bernard, of genius and baseness alloyed ... a book of misery and rancors, of bitterness and ridiculous irony . . . all written, apparently, in one breath. The writer never tires, never gives signs of fatigue. A book, moreover, of the most trenchant eloquence, vibrant with the racy, earthy eloquence of the masses. "...Something new, at last, in literature! A regenerated form; newly discovered veins.” "...Céline," wrote Leon Trotsky in an essay published in the Atlantic Monthly, "walked into great literature as other men walk into their own homes." "For this man, words are not pretty toys, nor playthings to soothe and caress and lull to sleep those who are seeking bedtime entertainment. In these days, when so much of American fiction seems to be the triumphant expression of the brightest boy and the cleverest girl in English Composition 1A— so deft, so felicitous, so smooth and slick; and withal so empty, juvenile, meaningless— Céline must come as a shock to readers who seek only to be amused. He attacks our unconscious complacency; he undermines our tacit assumptions; he defies our most cherished taboos; he makes us revise our moral values. It would be dishonest to deny that he is an anarchist— but his whole work is one long, sustained protest against that anarchy, that lawlessness into which the whole world finds itself plunged to-day. Céline rejects the superficial remedies, the noisy external revolutions, the shouting and the tumult. Because all that he writes is rooted in his own tragic experience, because he has lived these things, vitality and integrity pulsate through every word he utters." "Every writer is in his debt," writes Vonnegut, "and so is anyone else interested in discussing lives in their entirety. By being so impolite, he demonstrated that perhaps half of all experience, the animal half, had been concealed by good manners. No honest writer or speaker will ever want to be polite again." Translated by Ralph Manheim, and read by David Colacci.