Word: ferdinands
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DEATH ON THE INSTALLMENT PLAN by Louis-Ferdinand Céline, translated by Ralph Manheim. 592 pages. New Directions...
...more than 30 years, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, who died in disgrace and obscurity in 1961, has been both a scandal and a paradox. This new translation of the second of his two black classics suggests that Death on the Installment Plan should be discovered by a new generation of readers-and reread by those still scandalized and baffled by Céline...
Journey was a semiautobiographical story of a doctor, known in the book as Ferdinand Bardamu. "I have spent so many years as a doormat in the service of so many thousands of madmen that my memories alone would fill a whole insane asylum," Céline said. The novel was such an asylum. It seemed less a novel than a charade by a troupe of epileptics-convulsed by spasms of lust, rage, fear and disgust but denied the unconsciousness that is the mercy accorded the epileptic. It was clear to most critics that it was a work of genius...
...Speak? Speak?" Death on the Installment Plan (1936) records an earlier stage in Ferdinand's life and should be nicer reading, but it is not. It is even more painful, coming as it does, closer to the heart of Céline's anguished theme: innocence violated by life. It is the story of one of the most desolate boyhoods in all fiction. The key incident comes at the end of Ferdinand's stay at an English school to which his parents had sent him. He brutally seduces the only person who had shown him affection-Nora...
Death is no Dickensian satire against a Dotheboys Hall; the boys are as rotten as the masters. Ferdinand's only friend is a cretin named Yongkind who alone is incapable of malice or treachery. But he is made otherwise disgusting: gibbering, fouling his clothes, drinking ink, slavering over his food like a dog; his answer to everything is "Don't worry," or "Right as rain...