Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky's book review of Celine's novel " Journey to the End of the Night "

This is what Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky wrote about Celine's novel " Journey to the End of the Night " : [ " Celine does not at all set himself the goal of exposing social conditions in France. True, in passing, he spares neither priests nor generals nor ministers, nor the president of the republic. But all the while the warp of his tale extends considerably below the level of the ruling classes, cutting across the milieu of little men, functionaries, students, traders, artisans, and concierges; and in addition, on two occasions, it transports itself beyond the boundaries of France. The present social system is as rotten as every other, whether past or future. Celine, in general, is dissatisfied with men and their affairs. The novel is conceived and executed as a panorama of life's meaninglessness, with its cruelties, conflicts, and lies, with no issue, and no light flickering. A non-commissioned officer torturing the soldiers just before he perishes together with them; an American coupon clipper airing her emptiness in European hotels; French colonial functionaries brutalized by greed and failure; New York, with its automatic unconcern for the man without a checkbook, technically perfected to suck the marrow from human bones; then Paris again; the petty and envious little universe of scholars; the protracted and docile death of a seven-year-old boy; the rape of a little girl; the little virtuous rentiers who murder their mother in order to economize; the priest in Paris and the priest in darkest Africa, both equally alert to sell a man for a few hundred francs, the one an accomplice of civilized rentiers, the other in cahoots with cannibals … from chapter to chapter, from one page to the next, the slivers of life compose themselves into a mud-caked, bloody nightmare of meaninglessness. Receptivity which is passive, with its nerves sliced open, without the will straining toward the future — that is the psychological base of despair, sincere in the convulsions of its cynicism. Celine the moralist follows the footsteps of the artist, and step by step he rips away the halo from all those social values which have become highly acclaimed through custom, from patriotism and personal ties down to love. Is the fatherland in danger? "No great loss, when the landlord's house burns down. … There will be rent to pay just the same." He has no use for historical criteria. Danton's war is not superior to Poincaré's: in both instances the "patriotic function" was paid in the coin of blood. Love is poisoned by selfishness and vanity. All forms of idealism are merely "petty instincts draped in high-faluting phrases." Even the image of the mother is not spared: on meeting her wounded son "she squealed like a bitch whose pup had been restored. But she was beneath a bitch because she had faith in those syllables she was told in order to deprive her of her son." Celine's style is subordinated to his receptivity of the objective world. In his seemingly careless, ungrammatical, passionately condensed language there lives, beats, and vibrates the genuine wealth of French culture, the entire emotional and mental experience of a great nation, in its living content, in its keenest tints. " ] Image: Journey to the End of the Night, Louis-Ferdinand Celine, Penguin ... GOOGLE.COM Image: Journey to the End of the Night, Louis-Ferdinand Celine, Penguin ... Found on Google from www.pinterest.com