Louis-Ferdinand Céline has 4 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 5 narrators, with an average listener rating of 4.8★ across 10 ratings. The most-rated is Journey to the End of the Night.
Journey to the End of the Night
Summary
Louis-Ferdinand Celine's revulsion and anger at what he considered the idiocy and hypocrisy of society explodes from nearly every minute of this novel. Filled with slang and obscenities and written in raw, colloquial language, Journey to the End of the Night is a literary symphony of violence, cruelty, and obscene nihilism. This book shocked most critics when it was first published in France in 1932, but quickly became a success with the public in Europe, and later in America, where it was first published by New Directions in 1952. The story of the improbable, yet convincingly described travels of the petit-bourgeois (and largely autobiographical) antihero, Bardamu, from the trenches of World War I, to the African jungle, to New York and Detroit, and finally to life as a failed doctor in Paris, takes the listeners by the scruff and hurtles them toward the novel's inevitable, sad conclusion.
©1952 Louis-Ferdinand Céline. Translation copyright 1983 by Ralph Manheim. Afterword copyright 2006 by William T. Vollmann (P)2016 Tantor
Voyage au bout de la nuit
Summary
Voyage au bout de la nuit, chef d'œuvre littéraire incontesté dont Denis Poadalydès nous restitue toute la force brute, est présenté pour la première fois en version numérique (en coédition avec l'Historial de la Grande Guerre, et en accord avec Gallimard et la Succession Céline).
©1932 Gallimard (P)2003 Frémeaux & Associés
Death on the Installment Plan
Summary
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
Correspondances avec Gaston Gallimard
Summary
Gaston Gallimard (1881-1975), fondateur des Éditions de la Nouvelle Revue française avec André Gide et Jean Schlumberger, confia un jour à Jean Cau qu'il n'écrirait jamais ses mémoires d'éditeur, craignant de ruiner sa maison en disant tout ce qu'il y avait vu et tout ce qu'il savait des mœurs et pratiques de la vie littéraire. Il ne les écrivit pas et, pour finir, se confia peu. Louable pudeur. Mais les grandes correspondances éditoriales publiées depuis lors sont là qui comblent ce manque. Gaston Gallimard et son conseiller Jean Paulhan y déploient des trésors d'adresse pour répondre aux jalousies, susceptibilités, reproches ou insultes des auteurs phares de la maison : Gide, Claudel, Proust, ou Céline... et les retenir tous auprès de lui malgré des divergences de vues souvent radicales. Des échanges riches d'enseignements sur la vie littéraire et éditoriale du XXe siècle.
©2011 Éditions Gallimard (P)2011 Éditions Gallimard