First published in 1932, Journey to the End of the Night was immediately
acclaimed as a masterpiece and a turning point in French literature. This
edition contains a foreword by John Banville. Told in the first person, the
novel is based on the author's own experiences during the First World War,
in French colonial Africa, in the USA - where he worked for a while at the
Ford factory in Detroit - and later as a young doctor in a working-class
suburb in Paris. Celine's disgust with human folly, malice, greed and the
chaotic state in which man has left society lies behind the bitterness that
distinguishes his idiosyncratic, colloquial and visionary writing and gives
it its force.