Vollman, William T.
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- You will be quoting this book for a while!
- One of those books you have to read before ...
- Journey to the End of the Night
- Unsurpassed
- Bardamu = Rimbaud?
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Journey to the End of the Night (New Directions Paperbook)
Louis-Ferdinand Celine
Manufacturer: New Directions
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
 Contemporary
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ASIN: 0811216543 |
Amazon.com
When it was published in 1932, this then-shocking and revolutionary first fiction redefined the art of the novel with its black humor, its nihilism, and its irreverent, explosive writing style, and made Louis-Ferdinand Celine one of France's--and literature's--most important 20th-Century writers. The picaresque adventures of Bardamu, the sarcastic and brilliant antihero of Journey to the End of the Night move from the battlefields of World War I (complete with buffoonish officers and cowardly soldiers), to French West Africa, the United States, and back to France in a style of prose that's lyrical, hallucinatory, and hilariously scathing toward nearly everybody and everything. Yet, beneath it all one can detect a gentle core of idealism.
Book Description
<B>The dark side of On the Road: instead of seeking kicks, the French narrator travels the globe to find an ever deeper disgust for life.</B><BR><BR>Louis-Ferdinand Céline's revulsion and anger at what he considered the idiocy and hypocrisy of society explodes from nearly every page 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 reading 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 readers by the scruff and hurtles them toward the novel's inevitable, sad conclusion.
Customer Reviews:
You will be quoting this book for a while!.......2007-06-08
I can't think of a more original , funny and yet saracastic book than this one. Just when you think that the author had exhausted his brilliant use of words to describe an aspect of human nature and French society, he comes up with something new within the next paragraph or page. This book is tilted towards describing more of the negative aspects of everything but there are enough positive books out there for any one to read. For something with passages that will literally make you laugh out loud and get you to rethink the extent of free creative writing during the early 20th century , read this book at once! If you're easily offended or constantly critiquing a work of art as you read it, then this one is not for you.
One of those books you have to read before ..........2007-05-14
This review refer to Spanish version - " Viaje al Fin de la Noche" / Maestros del Siglo XX- Editorial Oveja Negra
I read this book in my early twenties, along a long list of nihilist, existentialist... the unavoidable Henry Miller.. I was captivated by the expressionisms of his own inner feeling as he travels here and there observing an absurd humanity.
I'm just picking up the book and looking at the notes I made so long ago, not so clear...
Definitely the book to read in the twenties, the book to review in your forties and I predict the book to quietly glimpse and flavor in your sixties.
Human spirit is contradictory, the pen that accomplished this fine work was an anti-Semitic and pro-occupations of the Nazis.. as one preface of the book says, he avoided the death sentence by a miraculously act.. Being I an absolute anti-Nazi .. I can only judge the literary creation and not its creator
My notes take me so far away.. I guess the notions of love and the uneasy feeling of trying to observe stoically the stupidly of nature, came in part from here... in those days my feelings of anti-Europeanism were forming from the study of its militaristic history and by the conviction that the last wars of humanity were going to start there.. all of that changed, of course, but the notion of how absurd the I WW was, came from the insight (I am not a translator so please forgive any fatal errors)
".. No matter how hard I tried to look into my memory, I cannot recall of any harm I had done to the Germans. I always was nice and educated toward them. I knew the Germans a little, I even assisted to a schooling Germany when I was a younger in the surroundings of Hanover. I had spoken their language. Back then they were a noisy screaming mass of howling punks. After school we went to the surrounding woods to fondle the girls, we also shot with pistols and arches that we bought for four marks. We drank beer with sugar. But form that to be here killing each others without further explanations, here in the middle of the road, there seemed to be emptiness even an abyss. Just too much of a difference"
Be ready to embark in a literary journey of fine XX century prose
Journey to the End of the Night.......2006-10-31
Louis-Ferdinand Céline delivers as a contemporary of both Ernest Hemingway and Albert Camus.
This novel written in the wake of World War I delves into the existential thought popular for the day. As a man who has experienced war, a voyage to Africa, a brief stay in America, and finally becomes a Doctor in a suburb of Paris, Louis travels the gamut of his own soul.
In his trek to the end of the night, he entertains the reader with his sarcasm, and insight into human nature. He sees the pig in all people.
However, I found myself lost in translation at times. Louis can become quite abstract in his thoughts. Ramblings change the scenery quickly. Suddenly you find yourself in New York city, when only pages ago you were reading about fevers in Africa. Don't get lost in the details . . . continue to forge ahead!
And in the end it wraps up like a Hemingway story with all the trappings of Camus. What does this all mean?
Unsurpassed.......2006-06-13
I first read this book during my freshman year in college. That was in 1990 - I have read it at least once a year since. I am a voracious reader, ingesting well over a hundred books each year and have not yet found another book that resonates with so much energy, grit, and beauty.
Bardamu = Rimbaud?.......2006-06-05
"Every poor man's desire is punishable by law."
I just thought I would mention that the main character's name, Bardamu, is almost an exact anagram for 'Rimbaud', the French poet that lived a generation before Celine. I wonder if this is intentional or not? you decide
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Butterfly Stories
William T. Vollman
Manufacturer: Grove Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
ASIN: B000I84DNE |
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An Afghanistan Picture Show
William T. Vollman
Manufacturer: Farrar Straus Giroux
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
ASIN: B000IMNQYM |
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The Atlas
William T. Vollman
Manufacturer: Viking
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
ASIN: B000K17E94 |
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Whores for Gloria
William T. Vollman
Manufacturer: New York: Pantheon Books,
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000OVAOFG |
Average customer rating:
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Ken Miller: Open All Night
William T. Vollman; Photographs By Ken Miller
Manufacturer: OVERLOOK PRESS
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
ASIN: B000OJKLF6 |
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Whores for Gloria
William T. Vollman
Manufacturer: Pantheon
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
ASIN: B000IMLPWW |
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- The 7 Volume Set
- His Life's work, abridged, a worthwhile pursuit for him
- The abyss gazeth also into thee...
- Vanquishing Personal Demons
- One of a kind
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Rising Up and Rising Down
William T. Vollman
Manufacturer: Gerald Duckworth & Co Ltd
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
Ethics & Morality
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ASIN: 0715633740 |
Customer Reviews:
The 7 Volume Set.......2007-04-10
Vollmann's work is expensive, sprawling, beautiful, and sterilizingly heavy. It's historical analysis, personal anecdote, philosophical inquiry, ethical manifesto, war journalism (his), photography and drawings (mostly his), and thumbnail illustrations. And it's worth the price to get one of the few remaining sets. You'll become intimately acquainted with Trotsky, Cortes, Lincoln, Plato, John Brown, Stalin, Leonidas, Gandhi, the Unabomber, de Sade, Hitler, Montezuma, the Ik, Napoleon, and Mikhail Bakunin, among others. Will you run across an occasional typo or forced metaphor? Sure. But considering the product, who cares? It's brilliant and very, very readable. Two things particularly please me about this work. First, Vollmann never pretends to objectivity. RURD is an "essay" in the original sense of the word, and provokes plenty of discussion. Second, McSweeney's typography and binding are breathtaking, so that each volume is a pleasure to see and hold, much less read. If you enjoy the abridgment, the set is worth all 50,000+ pennies, or whatever the last sets are going for.
His Life's work, abridged, a worthwhile pursuit for him.......2006-10-26
Vollmann has called this his life's work, and it shows, the book distills his original heart and soul, tearing through readable passages of objective reasoning, making circuitous and interesting routes towards his moral abstract for violence. The reading is passionate and well-reasoned, even if flawed at times. For me, it has exposed me to more historical figures and recent phiolospophical thinking that has escaped modern culture (or at least my Western one). I highly recommend this book for anyone who likes to observe history (like fans of Robert Conquest) through the lens of modern philospy.
The abyss gazeth also into thee..........2006-10-01
The philosophy of war has always been unsatisfying. Abstract "moral calculus" -the term deployed by Vollman to refer to the ethical analysis of violence - is clearly necessary, but the biological realities of violence always seem to render the sterile rationality of philosophers irrelevant. Determining when violence is and is not morally justified is such a difficult task that it is tempting to just dispose of the question, taking refuge in absolutist positions like pacifism or Kissingerian realism. As a result, worthwhile contributions to the practical ethics of war are few and far between.
This is the best attempt to reason through the moral problems of violence since Michael Walzer's "Just and Unjust Wars" and it improves on that flawed work in every way. Vollman's analysis is not limited to nation-states, he distinguishes between just and unjust regimes, he does not assume that there must be a binary moral value to every act of violence, and he knows when to conclude that a moral problem is insoluable.
Vollman passes judgment confidently when it is called for, but he has a healthy respect the lesser of two evils, the exigencies of war, and the pressures of decisionmaking in violent situations. He makes objective moral judgments, but they are clearly informed by his own subjective encounters with violence and death.
That said, this book has a lot of problems. First off, Vollman is clearly a thrill-seeker. When he talks about packing a handgun in Golden Gate Park or smoking crack cocaine, he reveals a very unusual attitude toward death. We should be suspicious of the moral handwringing of anyone who has deliberately seeks out violence. When he recounts the deaths of his colleagues while he was a reporter in the Balkans, I find myself wondering if this was not another "limit experience" that he actively chased. The experience of an aspiring novelist-DETERMINED to find abysses to gaze into-is just not comparable to that of the Somali and Sarajevan civilians who had no choice but to passively endure extreme violence.
The other big problem with this book is the lack of structure and logical rigor. If you have read any of his fiction, you know that this is just how Vollman's (brilliant) mind works, but this book suffers for it. It's a sustained meditation on violence, not a work to which the reader can refer for moral guidance in a specific situation. But it's still the best contemporary work in an otherwise empty field and very much worth reading.
Vanquishing Personal Demons.......2005-10-03
In writing Rising Up and Rising Down, William T. Vollmann has forgotten that the primary purpose of writing a book is communication. To this end, one would expect the author to use a consistent style to aid the reader's progress, rather than arguing:
Should I have standardized these inconsistencies? I recall Lawrence of Arabia's comments to the proofreader who warned him that he had spelled the name of this favorite camel every which way in Seven Pillars of Wisdom. Lawrence replied simply, "She was a splendid beast." (p. 534.)
One would also expect the writer to express his ideas, not only completely, but also concisely. Even in the abridged version, arguments are stated one on top of the other, separated from the information that supports them. As the book progresses, earlier arguments are often referred to by number, forcing the reader to flip through the pages to recall the passages cited.
Near the beginning of the book, Vollmann writes:
I had a gun . . . and right then I did not feel comforted . . . The books that I read and the things that I saw while writing this book affected me more than I wanted them to . . . Near the end of the twenty years that I spent writing this book, I began to suffer from frequent nightmares of violence . . . They were not normal sights that I'd seen-or were they all too normal?-and these were not normal thoughts, and I knew this and sought to dampen the vibrations of my paranoia . . . (pp. 78-79)
I submit that Mr. Vollmann wrote this book, not to inform his readers, but to vanquish his own demons. In reading Rising Up and Rising Down, I was sometimes informed, sometimes confused and often numbed. Further revision and editing might make this book into a useful study in violence, or, perhaps it was never more than the author's self-therapy.
One of a kind.......2005-09-14
THis book was receommended in a blog that was debating the morality of force when collateral damage to non-combatants was a real possibility. To my shocked surprise, I found an intense, serious study of violence, freedom and "urgent means" (a euphemism for 'when nothing but force will do'). This is a single volume abridgement of a huge set of books and tends to be wordy and academic in places but well worth the time invested in reading. Examining the use of force in situations ranging from Napoleon to Stalin to the US War Between the States, the author explores the question of under what circumstances the use of violence may be justifiable. Even the advocates of non-violence such as Gandhi are not neglected in the discourse. There are no easy answers here and some of the discussion is frankly disturbing (as it should be, given the subject) but it is a masterful examination of why humans kill and the "moral calculus" they use to justify their actions.
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The Royal Family
William T. Vollman
Manufacturer: Viking
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
ASIN: B000IMWGSO |
Authors:
- Voltaire
- Vornholt, John
- Vreeland, Susan
- Vachss, Andrew
- Valentine, Douglas
- Paul Valéry
- Valéry, Paul
- Valgardson, W.D.
- César Vallejo
- Vallejo, César
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