Edition: Translation of Mort à Crédit.
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: New Directions Pub. Corp., [New York
Date Published: 1966
Description: Good. No dust jacket. Text in English, French. xi, 592 p. 21 cm. A New Directions book.. exlibris on front EP, light foxing to EP, minor fray at spine head. read more
Binding: Mass Market Paperback
Publisher: Signet
Date Published: 1966
Description: Good. Binding is tight and square. No names, no marks, no stickers. This is a very nice paperback copy. Light edge and corner wear, slight tan, a few tears where spine/cvr meet. We recommend PRIORITY MAIL for even faster delivery! Careful packaging and fast shipping. read more
Description: NY: Avon, no date. Issued as Avon book G-1022. Softcover. Numbers in felt pen on the front cover, some rubbing and cover wear, pages starting to tan. read more
Edition: 3rd printing
Binding: paperback
Publisher: New Directions, New York
Date Published: 1971
ISBN-13:9780811200172ISBN:0811200175
Description: Good (front endpaper removed) 8vo. 592pp. Classic book by Celine, describing his childhood in Paris slums, service in WWI, and African jungles, all in the inimitable Celine style; translated with an introduction by Ralph Manheim; front endpaper removed from this copy, covers lightly rubbed, and with reading creases to spine, G-VG throughout. read more
Binding: Softcover
Publisher: New Directions
Date Published: 1971-06-01
ISBN-13:9780811200172ISBN:0811200175
Description: NEW. Softcover. From an inventory that is 100% brand-new, 100% direct from the publishers' distribution channel. We carry NO pre-owned, NO remaindered. We pack in CARDBOARD to ensure the pristine quality is maintained. (Bubble-wrap alone is NOT sufficient to protect from USPS equipment. ) Guaranteed brand-NEW, protected with CARDBOARD, your satisfaction is guaranteed. BKLUVID: 9780811200172. read more
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: New Directions Publishing Corpor
Date Published: 1971
ISBN-13:9780811200172ISBN:0811200175
Description: New. Brand New! Buy with confidence-your satisfaction is guaranteed at B-Logistics! Due to the large scale of our operation, we do not have access to the specific contents/condition of our items. Please note that Expedited shipping is not available at this time. read more
Edition: Later printing
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: New Directions, New York
Date Published: 1971
ISBN-13:9780811200172ISBN:0811200175
Description: NEW. 592pp. Octavo [20.5cm] Paperback. NEW. From the back cover: "Death on the Installment Plan is a companion volume to Celine's earlier novel Journey to the End of the 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 ... read more
Edition: First Edition
Publisher: Little Brown
Date Published: 1938
Description: Near Fine. No Jacket. No Jacket. First Edition. First American Edition. Considered by many to be a great piece of writing. Celine was a great influence on the Beats, especially Kerouac and Ginsberg. A Near Fine copy. read more
Binding: Cloth
Publisher: New Direction, New York
Date Published: (nd)
Description: Very Good in Poor jacket. 8vo. 593 pp. Translated from the French by John H. P. Marks, with an introduction by Milton Hindus. Copyright page reads "Copyright 1938 by Little, Brown & Co. " but this is the later New Directions edition with the Hindus introduction dated 1947. One in the Modern Readers series. Sunning to head and foot of spine and along perimeter of covers, mild edgewear, corners bruised, price-clipped jacket is in nasty shape with large chips, flaps and spine separating, tape ... read more
Edition: 1st Ed. (U.S. )
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: New Directions Book, New York, NY
Date Published: 1966
Description: VG+/VG+ W/Dust Jacket 592ppGlossary DJ nicked head & foot of spine, 3/8" & 1/2" DJ tear foot of spine, pastedown endpapers discolored, page ends a little dull, O.w. clean, bright & tight. No ink names, bookplates, etc. Price unclipped. Text in Fine condition. read more
Edition: First American Edition.
Binding: Cloth
Publisher: NEW DIRECTIONS., NY
Date Published: 1966
Description: Dust Jacket Included. First of the new translation by Ralph Manheim. Near fine in a Vg. + or better dj. (Light trace of foxing at top edge. A few short edge tears & mild touches of shelfsoiling to covers of dj. ) read more
Edition: First Edition; First Printing
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Little Brown, Y3
Date Published: 1938
Description: Very Good in Good dust jacket. Hardcover. 8vo. Little Brown. 1938. 593 pgs. First US edition, thus. First state stated on verso page with date. Previously translated in an earlier edition but this is the preferable translation by John Marks. DJ in G-shape, with a large chip near the crown of the spine and edgewear present (although the quote from Trotsky on the rear DJ flap is priceless). No ownership marks present. Text is clean and free of marks. Binding tight and solid. No wear present to ... read more
Description: Fine. Dust Jacket Included. Translated by John H. P. Marks. Original owner's name and date front free endpaper else this is a tight, fine book in DJ with some soil back panel and shallow edge wear else very good plus. Uncommon in DJ. read more
"In this follow-up volume to Journey to the End of Night, Céline steps back and develops the fundamentally warped background of his hero in a strange and often very funny narrative replete with more ellipses than ten other novels. As in the first novel, Celine's characters are wonderfully drawn through fast-moving narrative. Highly recommended (but don't look for dialogue)."
"'Death On The Installment Plan' is a raging animal of a novel that eclipses even Celine's own 'Journey' (though, it must be said, not by much). Structurally it's a shambles, but the unbelievable energy behind each & every sentence is enough to propel the reader straight through the 600-odd pages. What few of the other reviews have pointed out is how gut-bustingly funny this book is. A laugh a line with Celine and no mistake...More than that, 'Death...' contains absolutely the funniest sex scene ever written, bar none. While 'Journey' is tighter and harsher and the later works are more crazily surreal, 'Death...' is the shot of pure Celine that literature needed when it was first published and which the literate world could use another dose of now."
"Wherever I go lately in literature, it seems the French have been there first. Today's episode of this might be called, "How the French saved Modernism from itself." Or at least, how Céline did. This companion to Journey to the End of the Night can be read equally well by itself. In it, a boy - why Ferdinand, it just so happens is his name - grows up at the turn of the century in middle-class Paris. This story looks closely at that boy and that environment, and adds a creative twist to the literary techniques of Modernism.
About the environment, Céline delivers a scathing account of the cruelties it engenders. People are driven to frenzy by their jobs, and the pressure of work never takes time off. Even at home, all talk, all interest, all attention invokes the terror of losing a job. So intense is this one obsession that personalities are warped into clinically diagnosable disorders. If the effort went for a good cause, conscience could at least rest easier. But all these folks are doing is selling doodads and gimcracks, or shuffling paper. "Is that all there is?" Stendhal asked in The Red and the Black, and readers here might wonder the same thing about the fruits of all these busy lives. Céline is both prescient and contemporary. We would never destroy our mental health for our jobs today, now, would we?
Upon the boy as well, the pressure never lets up. Work is the highest goal in life, the only path to virtue. So six-year-old Ferdinand's parents send him out to start earning his keep. What the kid is actually supposed to do is never quite clear, but it's clear enough that his parents are worse than useless. These witless, toxic cholerics spew forth their plaintive despair over what they see as their son's innumerable and irremediable faults. Their black rain of execration has its effect, and this gets us to the heart of the story. Shifting for himself, the boy stumbles into absurd situations, some raunchy, some cruel, some even hilarious. The author's ability to juxtapose the bad and the better of Ferdinand's odyssey is part of the book's genius.
Céline is often pegged as a misanthrope. Taken as a whole, his works demonstrate a more benign attitude. His writing dwells on the unseemly parts of human nature, but does so in order to bring out later, among the biting lines of text, the good he thinks humans are more realistically capable of. I had this feeling with Journey to the End of the Night, and I have it here too that, far from misanthropic, Celine is in a way one of the more humanistic of authors. He points readers not in the direction of some unattainable ideal of what the good should be, but toward what it actually is.
In this warped society, the lad, now a teen, can't find his station in life by working pillar to post. "But Uncle, I don't know how to do anything ... " he cries out toward the final pages. The uncle's lengthy response is a saving example of a realistically humane person in an inhuman world, and a clue to the true good in people. The author sorts through the sordid parts of life to get us to the better ones.
If I fault anything, it's the author's emphasis on the body (taking two pages to describe nausea, for example) and a couple of unconvincingly fantastical incidents. The English translation sometimes misfires, with "pack-jammed" instead of "jam-packed," or "bat the breeze" instead of "shoot the breeze." But spread out over 585 engrossing pages, these faults are small.
This edition (with the b&w of Céline) comes with an informative introduction and a useful glossary for unfamiliar French references. The text is filled with slang and direct language. Anyone looking for something out of the ordinary will enjoy biting into the mordant prose and the adventurous creativity of this semi-autobiographical tale."
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