Pero hoy no nos centraremos en la coincidencia entre aquellos que piensan que los hombres convivieron con los dinosaurios y aquellos que quieren quemar literatura. Hoy quemaremos literatura. No nos basaremos en criterios morales, sino literarios. Eso sí, pasad de quemar a Lucía Etxebarría, Mario Benedetti y acólitos, que odiarles está muy barato. El tema es otro: ¿Qué libros os han dicho que son imprescindibles, y habéis odiado? ¿Qué obras canónicas lanzáis desde el panteón a la pira?

Los míos son:

10. Absalom, Absalom - William Faulkner: Aparentemente es como sus mejores libros, pero sin sentido del humor ni inspiración. Un tostón. Sí que recomiendo: Mientras Agonizo, las Palmeras Salvajes, Luz de Agosto, Santuario; todas de Faulkner.

9. Los Hermanos Karamazov - Fyodor Dostoyevsky: Si Crimen y Castigo ya se me hizo dura de terminar, ésta, con sus diálogos y Reflexiones interminables, se me hizo imposible. Sí que recomiendo: Pasarse a Tólstoi.

8. Ada, o el Ardor - Vladimir Nabokov: Nabokov es pedante y divertido. Menos en Ada, donde toda la diversión se convierte en más pedantería, dando lugar a demasiada pedantería. Sí que recomiendo: Lolita, Pnin, Pálido Fuego; todas de Nabokov.

7. La Señora Dalloway - Virginia Woolf: Una mujer aburrida tiene un día aburrido. Hurra. Sí que recomiendo: Las Olas, Orlando, la película de las Horas, basada en un libro que está basado en Mrs. Dalloway.

6. Ferdydurke - Witold Gombrowicz: Apuesto a que Gombrowicz tardó una semana en escribir esto. Sí que recomiendo: La sinagoga de los Iconoclastas, de Rodolfo Wilcock. Porque sí.

5. La Muerte de Artemio Cruz - Carlos Fuentes: Un tipo muere en Méjico y yo me aburro. Sí que recomiendo: Si quieres muerte y Méjico, tanto los Detectives Salvajes como 2666 de Roberto Bolaño.

4. Corazón tan blanco - Javier Marías: Un hombre mira por la ventana de su habitación de hotel durante 100 páginas, y yo dejo de leer. Sí que recomiendo: Autores españoles contemporáneos que valen la pena - La Velocidad de los Jardines de Eloy Tizón o El Hermano de las Moscas de Jon Bilbao.

3. La Náusea - Jean Paul Sartre: Un hombre bebe whisky y reflexiona. Esto no es una novela, sino un aburrido tratado filosófico. Sí que recomiendo: Para novelas de reflexión, Herzog de Saul Bellow.

2. El Corazón de las Tinieblas - Joseph Conrad: Uno de los libros más aburridos jamás publicados. Tuve que leerlo en la universidad, y aunque es corto, me costó más que En Busca del Tiempo Perdido, que son 7 libros. Sí que recomiendo: Para leer sobre europeos en Africa, acudid a Louis Ferdinand Céline y su Viaje al fin de Noche. Una obra maestra.

1. Fantasmas - Paul Auster: Una historia predecible y personajes que se llaman como colores. Pretenciosa, y además se parece a todos los demás libros de Auster. Sí que recomiendo: La autobiografía de Paul Auster no está mal.

(Esta entrada está basada en una MUY similar de Esquire)

 "È triste la gente che si corica, si vede che se ne fottono che le cose vanno come vogliono loro, si vede che non cercano mica di capire loro, il perché uno è là. Gli fa proprio lo stesso. Dormono non importa come, è tipico dei gasati, dei babbioni, dei non suscettibili, americani o no. Hanno sempre la coscienza tranquilla.
Ne avevo viste troppe io di cose non chiare per essere contento. Ne sapevo troppo e non ne sapevo abbastanza. Bisogna uscire, ecco che mi dissi, uscire ancora. Forse incontrerai di nuovo Robinson. Era un’idea idiota evidentemente ma mi ci attaccavo per avere il pretesto di uscire di nuovo, tanto più che avevo un bel girarmi e rigirarmi sul paglione, non riuscivo ad agguantare un briciolo di sonno. Anche a masturbarsi in quei casi lì non si prova né conforto, né distrazione. Allora è la vera disperazione.
Quel che è peggio è che uno si chiede come l’indomani troverà quel po’ di forza per continuare a fare quel che ha fatto il giorno prima e poi già da tanto tempo, dove troverà la forza per quelle iniziative sceme, quei mille progetti che non arrivano a niente, quei tentativi per uscire dalla necessità opprimente, tentativi che abortiscono sempre, e tutti per arrivare a convincersi una volta per tutte che il destino è invincibile, che bisogna sempre ricadere ai piedi della muraglia, ogni sera, sotto l’angoscia dell’indomani sempre più precario, più sordido.
Forse è anche l’età che sopraggiunge, traditora, e ci annuncia il peggio. Non si ha molta musica in sé per far ballare la vita, ecco. Tutta la gioventù è andata a morire in capo al mondo nel silenzio della verità. E dove andar fuori, ve lo chiedo, quando uno non ha più dentro una quantità sufficiente di delirio? La verità, è un’agonia che non finisce mai. La verità di questo mondo è la morte. Bisogna scegliere, morire o mentire. Non ho mai potuto uccidermi io.
La cosa migliore era dunque uscire per strada, ‘sto piccolo suicidio. Ognuno ha il suo bernoccolo, il suo metodo per conquistare sonno e sbobba. Dovevo proprio riuscire a dormire per ritrovare abbastanza forze da guadagnarmi un tozzo di pane l’indomani. Ritrovare lo slancio, giusto quel che bastava per trovare un lavoro domani e scavalcare subito, aspettando, l’ignoto, del sonno. Non bisogna credere che è facile addormentarsi una volta che ti sei messo a dubitare di tutto, soprattutto a causa di tutte quelle paure che ti hanno fatto".

Louis Ferdinand Céline, Viaggio a termine della notte.

Ce Monde n'est qu'une immense entreprise à se foutre du monde.

Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Voyage au bout de la nuit.

“La reelaboración y potenciación de la primera persona tiene como gran fondo a escritores como Dante, el Arcipreste de Hita, Casanova, Marcel Proust, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Jorge Luis Borges, Thomas Bernhard, Jorge Semprún, Marguerite Duras, Philip Roth y W. G. Sebald. Mientras, en las últimas tres décadas entre los españoles que se han acercado a esos caminos bifurcados están Carmen Martín Gaite, Carlos Barral, Juan y Luis Goytisolo, Juan José Millás y un Javier Marías que en 1987 escribió el artículo Autobiografía y ficción, en el cual hablaba de una incipiente tercera manera de "enfrentarse con el material verídico o verdadero", y expresaba interés y tentación por esta fórmula de "abordar el campo autobiográfico, pero sólo como ficción". Dos años después publicó Todas las almas, y en 1998 esa "falsa novela" titulada Negra espalda del tiempo”. (…)

Artículo completo en Babelia.

Avevo semplicemente in mente un post ridicolo con questo titolo.

Cerco su google. Trovo come primo risultato un post sul forum di alfemminile.

Metto il link alla cache di google perché il server di alfemminile deve avere attualmente una SPM. Ad ogni buon modo dovrebbe essere il primo risultato cercando sodomia portami via su google.

Cara mia. Non hai capito nulla. Questo messaggio che hai lasciato è di una tristezza enorme, e tale tristezza mi ha accompagnato per molte ore.

Se posso...

1. SE non hai voglia di fare sesso anale. NON FARLO.

E non c'è un punto due. Se tu vedi il sesso anale come, cito: "Gli uomini ci tengono tanto a sta cosa. Li fa sentire importanti, dominanti, potenti." vuol dire che non te ne frega tanto del materiale umano che hai di fronte e ti fa abbastanza ribrezzo. Io, fossi una donna, non potrei mai amare un appartenente a un genere quale tu hai descritto.

Quel che hai scritto è abbastanza rivoltante.

Secondo questo post - in cui si spiega che il sesso anale è solo una pratica data "per miracolosa concessione" - allora non vedo perché, a ragione d'essere, un uomo dovrebbe praticare sesso orale. La passera, se non fosse la passera, è un posto disgustoso a vedersi e a farsi.

Ma è una cosa che piace alla persona che ami ed è una parte della sua vita e non esiste nulla che mi possa schifare, né dar fastidio, se posso dare piacere alla persona cui do tutto quello che posso dare.

Allora il discorso nasce a monte. Cara mia, PERCHÈ devi fare sesso anale e non fartelo piacere se a lui piace? E soprattutto viverne nel tormento?

E...

Carissima, ultima cosa, non sono un bambino e ho fatto e ricevuto praticamente tutto, ma a me il sesso anale, come altre cose, non piace e non m'ha mai ispirato. Non mi è mai stato richiesto e perciò ne sono fondamentalmente estraneo. Però l'unica volta che l'ho praticato, cara, è stato proprio per sbaglio.

Sbaglio, sì. Cosa che pare impossibile per le donne che non sanno evidentemente che l'uomo non ha un mirino sull'uccello per centrare le parti anatomiche - tanto distanti fra l'altro - al volo.

Capita, che presi dalla passione, una coppia sia tanto agitata su un tavolo e tanto preda dei propri umori che il buco finisca ad essere sbagliato, tanto da entrare senza problemi perché le parti sono completamente bagnate dalla passione. Tanto da fare un rapido e comico controllo sulle aperture rimaste libere e uscirne dopo poco.

Carissima, non prendertela. È vero che nelle intenzioni doveva essere un post divertente, però non dovresti dare troppe cose per scontate.

"È più difficile rinunciare all'amore che alla vita."

Louis-Ferdinand Céline

piccola precisazione, io non so nulla di che significa essere una donna, ciò non vuol dire però che determinati punti di vista non debbano contrastarsi.

Louis-Ferdinand Céline with a stranger

Louis-Ferdinand Céline

Bob Dylan

Naked walking

Home, mania and depression II

Home, mania and depression I

Ioana Luca

Albert Camus

Albert Camus

Marilyn Monroe

Henry Miller in the studio

Hoki Tookuda and Henry Miller

Henry Miller

June Mansfield

June Mansfield

June Mansfield

June Mansfield

Anaïs Nin II

Anaïs Nin I

Anaïs Nin III

Charles Bukowski

Charles Bukowski

Charles Bukowski and Strangers

Teenage commercial party I

Teenage commercial party III

Teenage commercial party II

Die Beerdigung Heinrich Bölls II

Beerdigung Heinrich Bölls

Heinrich Böll

Heinrich Böll

Alexander Issajewitsch Solschenizyn und Heinrich Böll spazierengehend

Alexander Issajewitsch Solschenizyn und Heinrich Böll spazierengehend

Heinrich Böll und Romy Schneider II

Heinrich Böll und Romy Schneider

Heinrich Böll, Herbert Wehner, Willy Brandt

Heinrich Böll

Heinrich Böll

Alexander Issajewitsch Solschenizyn

Alexander Issajewitsch Solschenizyn

Die Badenden II

Die Badenden I

Walking in a park

Eternity III

Eternity II

Eternity

Das Badezimmer II

Das Badezimmer I

James Baldwin

horsewoman III

horsewoman II

horsewoman I

childhood

horsewoman

1959 - the never land

Nackte in den Feldern

Nackte und Wiese

Joy

Philip Roth

Philip Roth II

Philip Roth III

http://foth-malerei.com/

Their campaign?

• All that is positive, optimistic and imbued with strength.

Their logic?

• Why think about those things that we struggle with when we can hone what we do well into something we do great.

Take for instance Dewitt Jones. Jones, a national geographic photographer, has made training videos for workplaces to use that addresses how to Celebrate What Is Right With The World. While Dewitt is celebrating the beauty of the world he fails to recognize all that is not. It is not that I seek to dwell on all that is wrong with the world either, but I do think there is a compromise. Mark Strand, former poet laureate (90-91), said it best when he referred to critics who characterized his poetry as being dark or brooding. Strand, however, said that he found his poetry to be "evenly lit" rather than brooding or dark. This, in my opinion, is what is wrong with celebrating what is right with the world.

Therapist Bill Doherty (University of Minnesota researcher) was recently interviewed about the institution of marriage in Minnesota Monthly. In the article he talks about how the stigma of divorce has pretty much disappeared, but expectations for marriage have skyrocketed. He was quoted as saying, "Marriage has weakened as an institution while the ideas for what is should accomplish have gone through the roof." Doherty points to our consumer culture for this discrepancy; once the widget stops meeting your need you purchase another widget that can. I also think this has something to do with people who have become infected with the Dewitt Jones line of thinking. It should be noted that Dewitt's most recent book was created alongside of Stephen Covey. Covey, for those that do not know, is one of the chief proprietors of this type of thinking.

Now, let's look at Denmark; the happiest place on earth. While I do not pretend to know the details of how the study was conducted or its reliability, I do think one of the ideas that has emerged from the study is interesting. One of the explanations for why the Danes are so happy is they have lower expectations than the rest of us. By having lower expectations the Danes are better able to celebrate and appreciate the world around them. This, to me, illustrates the flaw in focusing on all that is positive, optimistic and imbued with strength.

All the positivity and optimism spun by these CONsultants is just an efficient guise of an ethic of care. There are so many other ways to better yourself...chief among these ways is to resign yourself to listening to the world around you rather than talking over it. I will leave you with a paragraph from one of my heroes -

"One fine day you decide to talk less and less about the things you care most about, and when you have to say something, it costs you an effort...You're good and sick of hearing yourself talk...you abridge...You give up...For thirty years you've been talking...You don't care bout being right anymore. You even lose your desire to keep hold of the small place you'd reserve yourself among the pleasures of life...You're fed up...From that time on you're content to eat a little something, cadge a little warmth, and sleep as much as possible on the road to nowhere. To rekindle your interest, you'd have to think up some new grimaces to put on in the presence of others...But you no longer have the strength to renew your repertory. You stammer."

-Louis-Ferdinand Celine

Every 3 months I must go discuss nothing with a pleasant but useless elder Indian (from India) VA shrink. It's not her fault she's useless (except for prescribing medications). The world is batshit insane and everyone's life is in some measure a disaster. We're coerced to live this life on earth or suffer dire consequences on the Other Side for trying to crawl out the dog door of suicide. There's nothing A Doctor of Brain Firmware or anyone else can say or do for you. I understand writer Louis-Ferdinand Céline already covered all this but was not clever enough to call it the Céline Solution.

The only reason I played the VA's head game was to keep those anti-depressants coming.

Doctor India neither cared nor was indifferent about me. She was doing her government job for probably less money than someone with a private practice. Being older she will likely die before me and reincarnate into another Indian body. I wouldn't mind coming back as a vampire bat or box of tampons in the Playboy mansion.

Today I arrived at her office exceptionally happy for some reason, maybe because I was going to get to see the brain again.

On a high shelf in Doc India's office was a model of a human brain made of clear heavy glass, sitting in an open-topped plastic skull (minus jawbone).

What good was a model of the brain in a shrinks's office? I'd never heard of a shrink pointing to a spot on a plastic brain and explaining, "Your problem...is this area here...the Sea of Apathy is too mushy..." It was a prop, like a beaker filled with colored water bubbling from dry ice, indicating a mad scientist at work in a B movie.

Doc bid me to sit specifically in one of two identical chairs on the other side of her desk. I assumed this was some sort of psych test to determine compliance. Or maybe she was anal retentive, I had little time or interest in diagnosing her.

I was still chipper as I sat. I looked at the brain and realized I got it backwards, it was the skull base (minus lower jawbone) that was made of glass (or crystal, so this post can be connected to the new Indy Jones movie) and the model of the brain was cheap plastic. A shame, I thought, that I don't have a glass brain. People could look at each other through the distorted glass halves while I ignored them. When I got depressed I could pour ocean water in the halves and drift away. I guess my skull and head would also have to be glass for this to work....
"You seem better," Doc said.
"I feel better."
"What changed?"
"People say you should 'be yourself', which is useless advice...I suppose I just realized to accept who I am."

What I left out was that I'd given up. Fucked in every way but the one you pay dearly for and only I can unfuck myself. So it goes for everybody, with the tale of the tape being most people die with their gifts unused.

Most of the time I didn't care, the mentality of a drug addict minus the drugs. Useless society, useless world, 98% drones awaiting another 1% to write about the antics of the final 1% of criminals and celebrity fuckups. Instead of doing anything to get out of the hole, I'd simply learned to appreciate every second away from people, a consolation prize version of nirvana.

Doc India said, "I think you're ready to be discharged from the program."

Program? What program?

I agreed as long it meant getting to keep my prescrips.  Now I won't have to make the drive  to the ole VA every 3 months (parking is impossible) and deal with the Black working the check-in desk (fortunately not there today) who hated me for reasons unknown. I never looked forward to dealing with his bad attitude. How stupid do you have to be to start shit with people with mental problems?

The woman taking the Black's place didn't stamp the discharge paper NOT CRAZY. Nor should she have.

Vorrei parlarvi di un capolavoro pubblicato nel 1932: Viaggio al termine della notte del narratore Louis-Ferdinand Céline (1894-1961), romanzo dalla violenta e distruttiva carica espressionistica e antiborghese in cui la corrosione dei personaggi e del linguaggio approda al delirio e alla poesia.

<< Cosa conta il mio libro? Non è letteratura. È vita, la vita così come si presenta. La miseria umana mi sconvolge, fisica o morale che sia. È sempre esistita d’accordo; ma un tempo la si offriva a un Dio, qualunque esso fosse. Oggi il mondo è pieno di miserabili e la loro angoscia non ha più nessun senso. La nostra epoca d’altronde è un’epoca di misera senz’arte; una cosa penosa. L’uomo è nudo, spogliato di tutto, anche della fede in se stesso. Il mio libro è questo>>.

Céline è uno di quei rari scrittori che mette la propria “pelle sul tavolo”, decidendo di sprofondare interamente nella vita per poterla così rappresentare, esplorando le cavità più oscure e meschine dell’anima umana.

Con fatica, dunque, scrivo questi appunti di lettura, poiché esprimersi a riguardo è difficile. La mia unica aspirazione è invitare alla lettura chi non ha ancora letto quest’opera letteraria.

Scrive Ernesto Ferrero nella postfazione al libro:

<< […] che il consapevole delirio céliniano ne ha saputo cogliere come nessun altro gli aspetti fondamentali: gli orrori della guerra e della retorica patriottica di quelli che stavano a dirigere il macello nelle retrovie; la ferocia dello sfruttamento coloniale; la solitudine delle metropoli (New York) e gli incubi taylorismi delle catene di montaggio (la Ford a Detroit), il degrado urbano e l’abbruttimento operaio nella Parigi delle borgate, l’avvento di una piccola borghesia cinica e faccendiera, quella stessa di cui oggi contempliamo i guasti forse irreversibili nelle imprese ei figli e dei nipoti, al di qua e al di là delle Alpi>>.

In ogni pagina di Voyage c’è l’incombere del nulla, il sentimento della morte. Infatti Bardamu [e Céline in numerose interviste], protagonista del romanzo, afferma << la verità di questo mondo è la morte>>.

Lo stile, poi, è sorprendente. Peccato che il lettore non francese è condannato a perdere migliaia di toni e di tratti essenziali dell’opera, poiché Céline è attento al ritmo, alla sintassi, al lessico, per ottenere il risultato voluto, ossia che la scrittura ci suoni come parlato. Tuttavia non si tratta della semplice trasposizione del parlato. Lo scrittore francese è conscio del fatto che la letterale riproduzione di quest’ultimo non avrebbe nessun effetto sul lettore.

Infatti, dalla postfazione di Ferrero, leggiamo:

<< Scrive nel 1947 dalla Danimarca al giovane professore americano Milton Hindus, che si riprometteva in pari tempo di redimerlo dai suoi peccati di antisemitismo e di rilanciarlo come scrittore: “Far passare il linguaggio parlato in letteratura- non è questione di stenografia- Alle frasi, ai periodi, occorre imprimere una certa deformazione, un artificio tale che quando uno legge il libro gli sembri che gli si stia parlando all’orecchio- Si arriva a questo mediante una trasposizione di ciascuna parola che non è mai del tutto quella che ci si aspetta, una sorpresina. E’ quello che accade a un bastone immerso nell’acqua; perché appaia diritto bisogna spezzarlo un pochettino prima di immergerlo, deformarlo preventivamente, se così si può dire. Un bastone regolarmente diritto invece, immerso nell’acqua, allo sguardo sembra piegato. Lo stesso vale per il linguaggio- il più vivace dei dialetti, stenografato, risulta sulla pagina piatto, complicato e pesante- Volendo rendere per scritto l’effetto di spontaneità della vita parlata bisogna torcere la lingua in puro ritmo, cadenza, parole, ed è una sorta di poesia che produce un grande sortilegio- l’impressione, il fascino, il dinamismo- e poi occorre scegliere il proprio soggetto- Non tutto si può trasporre”.

.
Per concludere, mentre leggevo il libro, ero investito in pieno dalla forza oscura dei suoi personaggi e dalla rappresentazione dell’orrore della vita, meno, in verità, dal fascino vorticoso dello stile (mitigato, ahimè, dalla traduzione).

f.s.

Nel filmato - tratto da Pickwick, lo scrittore Alessandro Baricco introduce Viaggio al termine della notte, di Louis-Ferdinand Céline (Courbevoiz, Seine 1894 - Meudon, Parigi 1961). Ne legge uno struggente brano, l'addio del protagonista ad una donna amata in America, da cui egli si allontana senza un reale motivo, solo per fare ritorno in Europa.

.

 [Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Viaggio al termine della notte del narratore, ed. Tea, 2002, pag. 575, euro 8,50] 

 In questo volume, edito da SE, emerge la figura del medico/letterato Céline, imprudente e ferito. L’uomo che soffriva la stupidità, che percepiva il dolore esistenziale d’esser uomo empio, denigrato, degradato; sfregiato dall’ipocrisia e dalla morte.

Louis-Ferdinand Céline era una natura viscerale, istintiva. Era l’uomo del rifiuto e del delirio. Era lo scrittore che scoprì uno stile, il suo, inconfondibile. Linguaggio fortemente metaforizzato, vivo.
 
Questo volume ci restituisce, insomma, un frammento di vita letteraria dello scrittore francese.

f.s.

[Céline e l’attualità letteraria (1932-1957) a cura e con uno scritto di Giancarlo Pontiggia, SE, 2001, pag. 144, euro 10,33]

Den Fehler seines Lebens begeht der junge Medizinstudent Ferdinand Bardamu, als er, trunken vor Patriotismus, einer Marschkapelle bis in die Kaserne folgt. Hinter ihm schließen sich die Türen und obwohl er’s gleich bereut, ist er nun Teil der französischen Armee.

Mit diesem Einstieg beginnt Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s Buch „Reise ans Ende der Nacht“, dass ich, ein Geschenk meines lieben Freundes Boswell, vor rund zwei Wochen ausgelesen habe.

Aus der Kaserne geht es für Bardamu an die Front, wo ihn die Schrecken des Krieges erwarten. Obwohl er früh die Sinnlosigkeit des Kampfes erkennt, kann er sich, nun Meldereiter geworden, trotz einiger Versuche nicht abziehen lassen, erst eine Verwundung und eine Geisteskrankheit machen ihn dienstuntauglich und lassen ihn den Krieg überleben. Im Frieden wird Bardamu aus der Irrenanstalt entlassen und beginnt, rastlos von Ort zu Ort zu reisen. Von Frankreich geht es in afrikanische Kolonien, dann in die Vereinigten Staaten und wieder zurück nach Frankreich, wo er teils als Arzt, teils als Varietékünstler und als Irrenarzt arbeitet. Doch nirgendwo hält es ihn lange, entweder gibt er selbst auf, oder seine Umgebung, die aus lauter bizarren, verdorbenen, sterbenden Gestalten besteht, vertreibt ihn. Überhaupt, die Zivilisation! Nirgendwo wird sie tiefer und härter kritisiert als bei Céline…

Wie als Schatten Bardamus dient im Buch der Franzose Robinson, der noch verdorbener ist als er. In fast jeder Episode taucht er auf und in fast jeder Episode rutscht er tiefer in seinen Untergang hinein, bis er am Ende von einer enttäuschten Verlobten erschossen wird. Mit diesem Akt ist sozusagen das Ende der „Nacht“ (für Céline ist die Nacht hier ein Sinnbild für die menschliche Seele, aber auch für das Leben an sich) erreicht und die Lebensbeichte bricht ab.

Bei der Lektüre hat mich of Schaudern ergriffen und das Bedürfnis, nur nicht aufzuhören, nur immer weiter zu lesen. Das Buch ist nicht etwa leicht, es ist schwer, ein einziger Stream of Consciousness. Zwar ist die semi-fiktive Lebensbeichte Bardamus linear erzählt, doch absichtliche Lücken durchbrechen dieses Gerüst. Wie hat er den Krieg überlebt? Warum fährt er nach Afrika? Man erfährt es nicht.

Es ist auch kein leichtes Buch, weil sein Zynismus oft kaum erträglich ist. Der Mensch, das ist bei Céline ein Monstrum, ein Wesen, dass aus Niedertracht und Gewalt, Dreck und Sexualität und Wut, unendlich viel Wut besteht. Sicher, die Obszönitäten, mit denen der Text gespickt ist, können heute kaum noch jemanden schocken, da ist man härteres gewöhnt. Die Radikalität des Buches aber besteht wie heute. Selten wurde das menschliche Leben als so erbärmlich und armselig beschrieben, wie bei Céline.

Ähnlich wie bei Richard Wagner muß man aber gerade auch bei Céline Leben und Werk streng trennen. Céline der Mensch, das war ein autoritär denkender Anarchist, ein Antisemit und zeitweiliger Freund des Nationalsozialismus, ein in Selbstmitleid zerfließender Psychopat und Liebhaber wohltrainierter Frauenbeine, ein sorgsam gepflegter und sich selbst inszenierender Widerspruch in sich selbst. Sein Buch hat viel davon in sich – und ist doch mehr. Es ist radikal wie Ulysses, realistisch wie Berlin Alexanderplatz, gegen den Krieg wie Im Westen nichts neues, und das alles zusammengemischt. Camus, Sartre, vielleicht auch Malaparte sind ohne Céline nicht vorstellbar. Es ist ein radikales Buch, das gleichzeitig obszön und poetisch ist. Ich kann es nur empfehlen und möchte mir in Zukunft noch mehr Schriften des Autors zu Gemüte führen.

Besonders ist hier auch die – zur recht – preisgekrönte Übersetzung von Hinrich Schmidt-Henkel zu loben, dem es gelingt, die verschiedenen Sprachebenen und Erzählstile, die das Original bereithält, passend und modern zu übersetzen. Selbst Passagen, die im Original in Dialekt oder Pseudo-Dialekt wie dem Argot geschrieben sind, sind in der Übersetzung klar als solche erkennbar, ohne dass die Übersetzung je platt oder gekünstelt wirkt.

This is the first page, where it all started like this: Ferdinand met his pal Arthur Ganate at the Place Clichy, and he just started talking (he'd never said anything before that). Of course, when I lived in France, I made sure to meet a friend at the Place Clichy and get coffee with them. I'm lame like that.

The book is 350+ pages, so it's tough to pick out one spread that shows just how much Tardi adds to the story (I know I'm being effusive, but this is about my "favorite" books, don't forget). But, this page just gets me... Journey is an incredibly potent anti-war story, and Celine captures the futility, absurdity, and hypocrisy of war like few other authors I've ever read. The passage about the soldier vomiting over the pile of mangled, dead human meat has always stuck with me, and something about Tardi's illustration just nails the potency of the text perfectly.

This illustration is from one of my favorite passages in the novel. Ferdinand, well on his way to the end of the night (which is a cipher for what he sees as the ultimate triumph of human misery), finds himself living in a dirty tenement with a window that opens out to a narrow courtyard that captures all the sound from all the other units in the building. He becomes transfixed listening to the violence, suffering, abuse, and misery of his neighbors. Over the course of this section of the novel, he begins to realize that he has only scratched the surface on discovering what humans are capable of ... that there are layers and layers of horror in the world, and that the window next to the courtyard allows him to access them one by one, going deeper each time. Somehow, I find this passage inspiring through its grisly depiction of the world... it is so beautifully tragic (as is Ferdinand's entire quest) that I can't help but be emotionally moved by it, and it is the power of Celine's art not only to disgust me, but really to affect me that I find inspiring.

Of course, Celine is not one to be lionized, at least as a person. Brief background on the guy: he was a doctor who treated mostly poor people, and he didn't have formal training as a writer. His first "literary" piece of work was his doctoral thesis, a biography of the scientist Semmelweis, in which he took a lot of liberties in order to depict Semmelweis as a maverick genius who was persecuted by the academy of his day. He then published a play titled The Church, which (in my opinion at least) isn't very good and introduces the anti-semitism that characterizes a lot of his writing. From the play, he went on to write Journey (retreading some of the same locales as The Church, although with none of the heavy-handed plot and unnatural dialog), which is his unquestioned masterpiece. Interestingly, although racism and anti-semitism are absent from Journey, Celine famously wrote in the preface to a later edition of the novel that everything he was ever "hunted" for is there plain-as-day in Journey. I disagree with this, although it brings up the an important question about where Journey fits in with the rest of his work. Anyway, after Journey, Celine published Death on Credit, a prequel of sort. And then shit got fucked, as they say. He stopped writing novels and instead turned his talents to his "pamphlets" (which aren't pamphlets at all- more like 400 page books)... three of them published during the late 1930's. They are ridiculous anti-semitic, racist diatribes that mostly recycle facts from the anti-semitic newspapers circulated around France during that time. Well, that and ballet scenarios. Not kidding: his first, Bagatelles pour un massacre, begins with a conversation among four people, one of whom is a Jew, about how the Jews prevent real art from being shown to the people, and then, by way of example, segues into a full-fledged 25-page ballet scenario. This happens a few times in the book. The root of the anti-semitism has been apologized for ("He was just ignorant!" or "He didn't really want the Holocaust to happen!") My personal opinion is that a) you don't have to love an author as a human to love books he wrote; and b) Celine was an extremely flawed human. I think his staunch opposition to war (having fought and been injured in WWI) screwed with his brain to the point that he caught wind of a sinister plot by the Jews to lead the world back to war (propagated in propagandistic "newspapers"), and he couldn't get it out of his head... and that motivated him to publish awful things about Jews because he was... an extremely flawed human. He wasn't a Hitler supporter (he even writes something to the effect of, "Hitler? A cunt! Another Jew!" in one of his later pamphlets). I haven't read the whole thing (it gets fairly tedious, and it's goddamn offensive), but what I've read is really interesting. Aside from the whole anti-semitic/ballet dialectic (has there ever been a more ridiculous dialectic?), there's the issue of Celine's stylistic development; from a poetic standpoint, this book is a masterpiece. The ... ellipses that characterize his work (used to color characters' rants in Journey) start to take center stage for the first time in Bagatelles, dominating the text and giving it a songlike rhythm that's really mesmerizing.

I can't believe how lucky I was to have found this book, though. It is a facsimile of the original, but that doesn't bother me at all. You see, after the Germans fell in Europe, the Resistance raided Celine's apartment and burned most of his work (including the last 300 pages of his novel Casse-Pipe, which is really depressing to me, although I'm not about to start criticizing the French Resistance). Around the same time, Robert Denoel, Celine's publisher, was assassinated for working under collaborationist publishing houses during the Occupation. Celine had fled the country by this point, although he would eventually be jailed before being pardoned a few years later. When he came back to France, now around 1950, much of the Celine stigma was lifted, and Journey to the end of the Night and Death on Credit were republished. This is where his whole, "Everything you've ever hated about me is right here in this book" preface comes from.

Never republished, however, were his pamphlets. I understand this decision in the immediate aftermath of World War II, but now, with the perspective granted by 75 years of history, I think we're mature enough to read this stuff. I mean, Celine is one of the most important authors of the 20th century (try finding Henry Miller, Bukowski, or half the beats with no Celine), and I think it's a shame that such a significant portion of his body of work remains off-limits because of its subject matter. Like I said before, in the context of Celine the stylist (a stylist who has had a profound effect on literary style), these books are indispensable. Well, I spoke too soon: Bagatelles has been sanitized and published as Ballets without dancers, without music, without anything, a little book consisting of just the ballet scenarios. Because, I guess, ignorance about the context surrounding those scenarios is blissful.

Along the Seine river in Paris, booksellers set up each day and sell used books out of carts. Some sell fairly nice books, but most sell cheap paperbacks. The stock is inconsistent, as can be imagined, and so it's like a daily rummage sale. I got sick of it after a couple months, spending a few hours every weekend picking through books I had no interest in and never finding anything. Then, one day while I was walking to school, I decided to take a detour and check out the books, and I saw this one sitting in someone's cart wrapped in plastic. Like I said, it's a facsimile and therefore probably worth less than $50, but this is the kind of thing that's priceless to me, because it's so rare. There are some copies on Abebooks for around $350, but nothing beats stumbling upon a book like this, a book that even ardent Celine scholars probably haven't read, because it is absent from University libraries, bookstores, and pretty much everywhere. In fact, a professor of mine asked me if he could Xerox the entire book, because he had never come across a copy (and he was from France). So, deplorable as it is, I have to count it among my favorite books... which makes me a bad Jew, I'll admit. Still, the rarest book by my favorite author has to count for something, right?

Anyway, back to the story of this book. Journey to the end of the Night is my favorite book, hands down. There's so much in it beyond just the misanthropic worldview that people get hung up on- it's a great study of all the good and bad in human nature, and while it tends to wallow in the bad, I think there's plenty that's uplifting; you just have to dig for it. I've always had an affinity for illustrated books, and the illustrator here, Jacques Tardi, is legendary. The synergy between Celine's text and his drawings take the book to a new level. He's basically credited as a co-author on the book's cover, which is certainly deserving, given the amount of effort it must have taken to produce such a monumental amount of original illustrations. All in all, this book (especially now with this beautiful first-edition) is easily in my top 5 favorites in my collection.

But, there's always more... obviously, there's always more. In this case, the "more" takes the form of the first limited edition... limited to 120 copies in a clamshell box with an original, signed drawing by Tardi. <Swoon!> Most of the books in the "books I'll never have" category are there because of money (first edition of the Codex Seraphinianus, Joyce's Ulysses illustrated/signed by Henri Matisse, a Bukowski first edition of Ham on Rye with an original painting tipped in)... and I may one day have them if I end up being really rich or win the lottery or something. But this edition of Journey is in another category... it's in the "I can't even find the damn thing" realm. That means no copies on Abebooks or anywhere else on the net. It means no copies unearthed in a year of living in Paris and searching around at all the chi-chi bookstores there (and in the not so chi-chi ones as well). I have seen it before... It's beautiful. The clamshell box is black cloth with the type stamped in red, and with the cover illustration pasted down (ask me how I feel about pastedowns on cloth covers... I like them, okay?).

I saw it at an exhibition for a graphic designer that I went to with my friend one rainy Sunday in Paris. I didn't expect to find it there; my friend was a design student and had read about the exhibition in the little weekly events magazine, I went with him because I had nothing better to do. Turns out the guy we went to see is a famous font designer, and he designed the font for the Futuropolis logo (the original sketches of it were pretty cool). I asked the museum curator how much that book goes for on the street, and he chuckled. Total French behavior- the answer may have been $200, and because he thought I didn't look the part of a serious collector, he didn't want to be bothered telling me. Anyway, it's assuredly more than that (original Tardi drawings ain't cheap to begin with), and that's if I ever see it again. It is still the #1 book-I'd-kill-to-have, but I don't foresee that happening.

Lucien Francoeur débarque dans son café préféré d’Outremont. L’artiste rebelle et bohème de mon adolescence est méconnaissable. Sa longue tignasse est devenue blanche, son bagout est posé, calme. Mais Lucien Francoeur a conservé cette caractéristique d’être si captivant. Quand il discute livres, c’est tout un univers qui s’ouvre.

La vie de Lucien Francoeur n’est pas de tout repos. Professionnellement, il a tâté de tout: auteur, poète, chanteur, chroniqueur radio. Aujourd’hui, il a disparu des écrans radars alors qu’il transmet sa passion à des cégépiens. À travers les choix de lecture de ce récipiendaire du prix Émile-Nelligan, on découvre mieux l’être flamboyant.

Une BD réinventée
Lucien Francoeur est attiré par les œuvres qui réinventent les genres. Comme la série de bandes dessinées The Sandman, de l’auteur Neil Gaiman. «C’est comme une pièce de théâtre. Des dialogues avec des images», murmure le poète en fermant les yeux, levés au ciel. Lucien Francoeur semble dans un autre univers. «Je connaissais la BD The Sandman. Mais Gaiman l’a transformée. Il a radicalisé le héros, lui a enlevé ses barrières morales. The Sandman, c’est tout ce qui a trait au mystère, au rêve, au hasard, à la magie. Neil Gaiman a créé un héros qui n’est pas en colère, qui ne porte pas de cape. C’est ce que j’aime de cette BD: elle me fait entrer dans un univers où rien de ce que je connais n’a de prise. C’est l’inconnu. L’inattendu.» 

Livre de rebelle
Son deuxième coup de cœur ne surprend guère. Sur la route, de Jack Kerouac, qu’il a lu une cinquantaine de fois. «Ce que j’aime, c’est comment Kerouac a réussi à nous faire vivre le mouvement de sa vie mouvementée. C’est un roman de mouvance, où il est parvenu à fixer l’impossible, sur papier, tout ce qui est du domaine de l’éphémère quand tu voyages.

Comment se souvenir de tous ces moments passagers? Les américains ont pu lire pour la première fois ce qui se passait ailleurs: sur la route, la marginalité, les vagabonds, l’itinérance. Kerouac leur a donné droit de parole. Kerouac, c’est comme l’Iliade d’Homère. Avec son roman, il a créé la nouvelle mythologie.»   

Le chanteur enchaîne dans la même mouvance, soit la rupture avec le style de l’époque. Si Kerouac a révolutionné l’univers du livre dans les années 1950, Louis-Ferdinand Céline a eu le même effet dans les années 1930. «L’écriture française devient charnelle pour la première fois. On s’éloigne de l’écriture littéraire, intellectuelle. Céline, c’est une écriture virile, d’émotions. Ça entre par les pores de la peau. C’est une expérience physique. Tu as presque le goût de te lever et de marcher, en lisant. C’est du jamais vu. C’est ce que j’aime.»

Lucien Francoeur se dévoile. Il a choisi 3 auteurs qui n’ont pas suivi le même chemin que leurs collègues. «Tu as l’impression qu’ils se sont mis au monde eux-mêmes. Ils se sont créés eux-mêmes. Ils ont quand même des modèles. Mais on ne les voit pas. Moi, j’aime ça quand on peut sentir l’auteur, sentir son odeur. Pour moi, c’est irrésistible.»

Lucien Francoeur rouvre les yeux et quitte l’univers fabuleux de ses lectures. Dehors, il fait froid. Triste retour à la réalité. Mais on ressort le cœur et la tête au chaud.

Die Sprengkraft des Buchs findet sich im Stil: Als einer der ersten französischen Autoren verfasst er die Erzählpassagen seines Romans nicht in der üblichen Hochsprache, sondern benutzt durchgängig die ungeschönten Sprechweisen der unteren Schichten.

Ich hab das Buch schon lange zuhause im Regal, allerdings auch noch nicht gelesen...

Just make it to the car ... I can do this ... just ... oh fuck, please God ... let me make it to the car ... it's only 20 yards away ... and fucking hell keep my eyes down, keep 'm fucking down and my head ... come on ... concentrate on my shoes ... I can do it ... only a couple of yards now ...

Sat next to a relatively well-known, young, emerging British soap actress on the plane. Noticed her shiny Apple laptop, showed her proudly (but more abused, so less shiny) mine. 

Member. 

Of the becoming less and less in the minority, of the more and more of those in the know, of the less and less ones belonging to the once secret Apple community. Because of iPod and all that. And good on Apple for all that matters.

Apple users. When they meet by chance, discover their mutual secret. In the know. Tapping the side of their nose, if confident. Winking, if arrogant. Wanking, if über-mensch. George Michael should give it a go. Better than public toilets.

Certainly much much better than freemasonry. Not that I am that way inclined, yet I do believe fraternity issues are always much much better resolved in public parks/parking spaces/toilets/airplanes/pubs/clubs, don't you agree? I mean where else? A monastery?

Full of expectation like an over-enthusiastic teenage fan, saying "Hi!" while winking. Pointing at my proud member. Our mutual bond. In our once secret society. (Come on, be honest, you were waiting for a wanking pun there, weren't you?)

The little fucker wasn't having any of it. Had her Apple probably given to her as a present by the ultimate Apple über-fan, Stephen Fry. For her 18th birthday. Doesn't even know how lucky she is. 

Caught a glimpse of what she was writing. Some kind of diary, interior monologue, maybe a blog. Very personal, very amateur-ish. Rings a bell?

Caught a glimpse. Ok, more than a glimpse. Read the whole thing while pretending to work on my own blog entry. I was much faster than her spell checker and had to stop myself from pointing out spelling mistakes. Or grammar mistakes. Or stylistic mistakes. Who the fuck is saying? 

I'd like to report her ramblings were shoite. Yet, they were everything but. If anything, unquestionably, not ramblings. For one, she took quite a long time before she wrote a sentence. Seemed all quite thought out, considered. What then followed, what I then spied my beady eyes on was touching. Heartbreaking. Full stop.

Would have been breathtaking if she had typed, "the freak next to me is peeking at what I write", so I could write a reply on my laptop, "sorry, love, I had no right, my apologies, let me buy you a drink. What do you fancy?" and she'd smile, the widest of smiles of course, from the corner of my eye and type, "a gin and tonic, please" and Husten would strike up an affair with a famous Brit in the most Hollywood original kind of ways and live together long and happily after and we'd have no kids, just a couple of black and white, Border Collie dogs and lots of parties with lots of people up their own arse. 

But she didn't, so I intriguingly and unashamedly pursued my Peeping Tom role.

The italics above and below is a summary but this is, in one Céline-esque line, one nutshell, what she wrote during the flight about her experience with paparazzi.

Just make it to the car ... I can do this ... just ... oh fuck, please God ... let me make it to the car ... it's only 20 yards away ... and fucking hell keep my eyes down, keep 'm fucking down and my head ... come on ... concentrate on my shoes ... I can do it ... only a couple of yards now ...

For and from a late teenager, even with tabloid experience: pretty chilling, if you ask me.

da "Viaggio al termine della notte"

-Antonin Artaud

“What’s important, finally, is that you create, and that those creations define for you what matters most, that which cannot be extinguished even in the face of silence, solitude and rejection.”

-Betsy Lerner
The Forest For the Trees

I’ll be turning forty-four later this month and, naturally, with the passing of another year I can’t help taking stock, appraising the state of my life and work. That can be a tricky proposition, especially when you have, ahem, depressive tendencies.

The first thing that comes to mind whenever my birthday rolls around is the line from that old Pink Floyd song that goes “another day older, another day closer to death”. Some people actually celebrate their birthdays but not me—I have to dwell on mortality, my mind taking a sharp, left turn toward morbidity. Typical.

But the point of this post is not the inevitability of death (thank God), it’s about change, rites of passage, the sense of moving into another phase of my life and, especially, my writing life.

I’ve written a number of journal entries (don’t worry, I won’t reproduce them here, I have more respect for you than that) in which I state that I feel my literary apprenticeship is over and I now have a strong sense I can take all that I’ve learned and can finally start establishing my own unique voice.

Does twenty-two years seem like a rather extended apprenticeship? Not to me. Over the course of that time I have immersed myself in the best writers I could find, reading them, studying them with the rapt attention of a monk scrutinizing ancient holy texts.

Applying all I’ve learned and assimilated from the Masters has taught me technical craftsmanship but it has also reminded me of the importance of discipline, self-sacrifice and perseverance. They’ve given me crucial insights into the level of commitment and devotion required to create something of lasting worth. I’ve always admired authors who are original and innovative and now, more and more, I want to see those virtues reflected in my work.

And I don’t mean literary experiments, self-referential, modernist (or post-modernist) tripe composed for my eyes only and readers be damned. I’ve gone down that road before and while it produced some interesting prose, I found, after awhile, that it didn’t speak to my heart and spirit and resulted in closed, claustrophobic bits and pieces that seemed to obscure rather than illuminate. In the end, I abandoned that approach as a creative cul de sac, a road that went nowhere.

What I’m talking about are new approaches to characterization and, also, incorporating more cinematic elements to structure and story, employing multiple viewpoints, juxtapositions, flashbacks, superimpositions, fadeouts, cutaways…all in an effort to deny that old canard that “there’s nothing new under the sun”.

Nothing new…what a bunch of horseshit.

The first time I read Colson Whitehead’s The Intuitionist I knew I had found a writer with fresh ideas, thematically and stylistically. Every Cormac McCarthy novel I read is an epiphany. Project X by Jim Shepard body-slammed me with its remarkable authenticity.

The best authors have their own distinct perspective they bring into play…and after twenty-some years I can finally say that I’m ready to tell my stories my way. The history of the world from the standpoint of an agoraphobic neurotic obsessive-compulsive perfectionist with delusions of grandeur.

Or, looking at it another way, I can grace my stories with the hard-won insights of a man who has now lived more than half his life, who’s gotten married, has two sons, lost friends, gained friends, fought, fucked up, suffered, laughed, seen and done things I couldn’t have imagined even a decade ago. Thanks to a host of life experiences my work is informed by a richness and maturity that wasn’t there previously, deeper shades and tones I couldn’t have managed as a younger author.

I’m not as afraid as I used to be, not as prone to ungovernable fits of rage and frustration. That doesn’t deny my work passion, it means I can better channel, direct and control those passions that used to send me shooting off in all directions, dissipating my creative energies.

I’ve written extensively of futility on this blog, the despair that sometimes overwhelms me because of my brain chemistry and bad genetics. Some people have then turned around and used these confessions in other forums to attack my credibility on subjects relating to literature. I’m a “failed writer”, don’t I even admit it myself?

Yes, according to my high standards, my literary output seems pretty insubstantial. But look at who I’m holding myself up against, geniuses like Louis Ferdinand Celine and Joyce and Beckett and Bobby Stone. Who wouldn’t come off as second-rate compared to those lads?

But when I look at the wannabes out there, the ones who insist on calling themselves writers because they published a romantic fantasy novel in e-book form, I come off pretty well, don’t you think? These twats actually have the nerve to announce to the world they’ve written 80 or 100 (or more) novels in the course of their illustrious careers…and yet when you “Google” their names, none of their work seems to be kicking about. Funny. And they’re the first ones to get biscuit-ersed (Irvine Welsh’s hilarious phrase) when I talk about “aesthetics” and “critical reading”.

“I write to entertain,” they sniff daintily, demurely paging through a fat forest-killer with a dragon or unicorn on the cover. And when I call them on their silly pretensions, their transparent lies, I’m dubbed “elitist” or a “pompous ass”.

Go back to your fucking knitting, you hobbyists. How do you manage to see your keyboards with your heads so far up your own arseholes?

Worse yet are the horror hacks I’ve come across with their brain-sucking zombies and superannuated vampires and misogynistic rape fantasies. They go ballistic when I remind them of the subtle, cerebral horror of Roman Polanski. Their tastes run more toward the latest Rob Zombie abomination, great gouts of blood spraying everywhere to the accompaniment of a throbbing, crunching soundtrack. Subtlety to them is a body count under a hundred.

Horror fiction has been in the doldrums for a long time and I blame the splatterpunks, who unzipped their flies and pissed all over the genre in the late ’80’s and early 90’s. It’s never been a field that features good writing but, Christ, the stuff that’s been proliferating in the past ten to fifteen years is scraping the muck and slime off the bottom of the barrel. It’s time to take the genre back from these fuckheads—where is our generation’s Ira Levin or Clive Barker or Richard Matheson? Who will save us from these purveyors of shit?

Well, it won’t be me. I want nothing to do with horror until it cleans up its act. And that means smarter editors and more talented writers—and the chances of those things coming to pass are roughly the same as the Rapture sweeping up all the worthy Christians next Thursday (and good riddance to them).

In any event, I’ll still be here, in this 10 X 12 office, composing my strange, little stories, dreaming of a readership in the tens of millions. And I’m content with that.

An unjaundiced look at my career tells me things might be looking up. My novella “Kept” may or may not be made into a movie that may or may not be pretty good. I’m working on a new project, feeling more engaged than I’ve felt in a long while. My marriage is solid, my family the greatest support system a guy could ever want or have.

Success and riches may never come…but I made a conscious choice a long time ago that regardless of what happened I would never compromise, never sell out, that I would aggressively defend my offerings from the predations of those who are not worthy to pass judgment on any title more sophisticated than a Dick & Jane reader. That stance has probably cost me a shot at fame and fortune…but, conversely, my work can’t be accused of being derivative or formulaic and I’ve composed some truly original fiction that I believe will stand the test of time.

“Tell a good story and the readers will come…eventually,” I wrote on another blogger’s site and I believe that.

You found me here, didn’t you? And now you might just scroll down and read more screeds by this crazy fucking Canuck…or click on Stories and tackle the excerpt from my smashing great novel So Dark the Night (it’s worth it, believe me).

Thanks for taking the time to pop by—and I’m grateful, as well, to my regular readers, the repeat visitors to Beautiful Desolation, folks I’ve come to know through their comments and personal communications.

Let’s give it another forty-four years, shall we? See what happens. I’ll keep putting one word ahead of the next, telling my stories in my own inimitable style.

Yes, the apprenticeship is officially over. From here on, whenever you read one of my tales, the only voice you’ll hear is mine.

Listen to my song…

"Si la gente es tan mala, tal vez sea sólo porque sufre, pero pasa mucho tiempo entre el momento en que han dejado de sufrir y aquel en que se vuelven mejores."

Viaje al fin de la noche

Bullet points from pages 291 - 395

* Robinson is very much back on the scene but Ferdinand is desperate for him to leave

* His patient Bebert dies and his involvement with the Henrouille family drags on with the old woman boasting of how her son and daughter-in-law failed to get her sent to a convent or asylum

* Robinson hooks up with the Henrouilles and they build a rabbit hutch and then plan to put a bomb on the hutch and wait for the old woman to open it. The bomb is triggered by a rabbit as Robinson is fitting it and it blinds him

* Laid up in the top floor of the Henrouille's house eventually they hire the services of a priest who gets him a job in a church crypt in Toulouse and so Robinson heads South

* With Robinson gone Ferdinand expects an improvement in fortunes but when it doesn'?t come he decides to depart once and for all from Rancy and head off for new pastures

* It seems that everyone Ferdinand treats as a doctor ends up dying with Mr Henrouille dying of heart failure joining Bebert abd several other former patients. There is a beautifully described moment when Ferdinand sees some of these dead patients as ghosts floating as angels

* Having quit Rancy he drifts around, striking up a relationship with a Polish actress, but after meeting the priest who set Robinson and Senior Mrs Henrouille up with jobs in Toulouse he gets 1,500 francs and promises to go and see them

* Robinson is getting married and although Ferdinand has a bit of fun with his fiance he admits to himself he is jealous

With Robinson settling down and the ties in Rancy well and truly cut you wonder where is Ferdinand going next?

Sometimes that jerky fell can be as a result of it being a translated work but here you get the feeling it is more a deliberate style.

Bullet points between pages 3 – 94

* The story starts with Ferdinand and a friend arguing in a café about patriotism. In a fit of provocation he runs after a marching troop of soldiers and ends up joining up

* The story moves to the First World War where he discovers that he is a coward and afraid and his dislike and distrust of generals and authority figures emerges

* After being given a medal and sent back for some time to recuperate to Paris he meets an American Red Cross worker Lola who stirs and interest for him in the States

* After walking in a park and seeing a deserted shooting gallery Ferdinand had a fit of fear and starts shouting that everybody is going to be shot and ends up in a mental hospital

* Lola decides after a conversation about the war that he is a coward and that seems to be the end of that

* As the war starts to slip towards its end Ferdinand ends up in a relationship with a young prostitute, Musyne, who sings for the troops and as his jealousy mounts she leaves him

* He fails to get recalled because he is still below par and is sent to another hospital and there comes across a patriotic and confident doctor who thinks he is improving and allows him a visit from his mother who disappoints him with her complete belief in the doctors diagnosis

If you get the feeling that this is all stops and starts, just from my bullet points, then that is the way the book is flowing at the moment. There are no chapter headings and there is no contents panel to chart the development of the story. I’m hoping that things will improve a bit tomorrow…

Bullet points between 94 – 191

* Around page 100 the main character leaves Paris and heads for the French colonies.

* On the boat Ferdinand is discovered to be the only fee paying passenger and suspected of being a spy and is almost thrown overboard until he sacrifices his self respect to suck up to the soldiers attacking him

* Once in Africa he is given the job of going into the jungle to replace a man who is being recalled for failing to send the colonial trading company his accounts

* Before leaving the port to head up the river Ferdinand vows to get ill confiding that he knows how to pick up something that will be bad enough to get him sent home

* The man he is replacing is Robinson who he met in the war, again in Paris and now in the jungle. Only for a long time he can’t remember him then when he does Robinson disappears

* Four weeks later after being ill he burns down the shack and heads into the bush and ends up the Spanish run port of Santa Tapeta

* While ill he ends up being bought by a captain of a galley and ends up sailing across the Atlantic to New York

* He escapes from the boat and gets caught and ends up counting fleas at the immigrant landing station at Ellis Island. Then when asked to take some statistics across to New York he bolts for freedom

Still not an easy read and the fact that even as a pessimist he can’t seem to enjoy some of his good luck starts to grate after a while.

Throughout the African experience the natives are treated terribly by the French and there is a moment when he reaches a staging post and comes across Lieutenant Grappa, who is responsible for looking after a large patch of jungle and comes to the conclusion it all looks the same, that you understand why the French suffered in Vietnam.

Bearing that in mind I will post a review of The Last Valley by Martin Windrow tomorrow, which is about the demise of the French in Vietnam.