Word: yongkind
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
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...
This comic picaresque stuff is so easy to read that the reader might fail to notice Céline's didactic intentions. Courtial is Yongkind, grown up and equipped with a degree from the polytechnic, but the same optimistic cretin. In the person of Courtial, Celine pours all the vitriol of his prose on an age that believed science and progress would confer inestimable benefits upon mankind. Courtial's windy rhetoric on the subject of these benefits is mocked by the hiss of hot gases from his chronically punctured blimp. By the time the first great technological...
| 1 |