Death on the Installment Plan

De: Ralph Manheim - translated, Louis-Ferdinand Céline

Narrado por: David Colacci

Death on the Installment Plan is a companion volume to Louis-Ferinand Celine's earlier novel Journey to the End of Night.

Published in rapid succession in the middle 1930s, these two books shocked European literature and world consciousness. Nominally fiction but more rightly called "creative confessions," they told of the author's childhood in excoriating Paris slums, of service in the mud wastes of World War I and African jungles.

Mixing unmitigated despair with Gargantuan comedy, they also created a new style, in which invective and obscenity were laced with phrases of unforgettable poetry. Celine's influence revolutionized the contemporary approach to fiction. Under a cloud for a period, his work is now acknowledged as the forerunner of today's "black humor."

©1952 Librairie Gallimard (P)2020 Tantor

Céline!

excess is the best…hallucination and delirium w the occasional hard kernel of loss…narratological form extraordinary.

Great book . . . absolutely wrong narration

When you look at any page of Celine's writing (beginning with Death on the Installment Plan) you immediately know the author. You see a burst of phrases, snide remarks, short funny asides, soaring poetry . . . a kind of stream of consciousness on meth . . . spaced between ellipses. A few words . . . three dots . . . more words . . . dots . . . etc. forever. When you read it, you can't help but rip into a rat-a-tat, machine gun-like cadence in your head. Celine called it writing in Jazz. It's fast and furious. This narrator reads it slow, ponderous, void of its howl, its urgency and emotion . . . destroying an essential part of Celine's genius. Read it instead of listening to this slog. This audiobook narration diminishes the writing by half.

Just terrible

It's a testament to my stubborn nature that I finished this book. It's a slog of boring tedium that never resolves itself with a point to justify its own existence. The opening chapter is good, but from there it quickly devolves into a tedious ramble of details that ultimately go nowhere. I much preferred Journey, and would never recommend this drivel to anyone.

Awful

Worst "sequel" ever.. I profoundly hated this book. it will make you hate the original, too. HUGE mistake.