First, let me ask you: have you read 'Journey to the End of the Night'? If the answer is yes (and if you liked it) then my response to you is go ahead and read Death. Death is very similar to Journey, only Death takes place earlier in the life of Celine/Bardamu.
Plot (yes, there is one...kinda):
The book begins with a grown Bardamu, practicing medicine in the suburbs of Paris. Soon the action flashes back to his childhood, which is what the rest of the book is about. Like Journey, this book follows the narrator as he moves around to various destinations, including a number of apprenticeships in Paris, boarding school in England, and a farm. There are developed characters besides Bardamu; there are his parents, his uncle, and (best of all) a crazy Inventor who takes young Bardamu under his wing.
It was Bukowski who pointed me towards Celine. He praised Journey, but he said nothing about Death. Death was unavailable to me, and after I was done with Journey I tried to read Guignol's Band. I couldn't read it though due to the frequent incoherent streamofconscious rants (and perhaps because it wasn't a Manheim Translation). But then I moved and found Death on Credit (same...Credit is just the UK title, whereas it's installment plan in US), read it, and liked it even better than Journey. There are one or two short parts of surreal/hallucinatory sequences. Even those are short; 98% of the book I would describe as concrete events written coherently.
Celine has changed his style a little with his second book. Ellipses are used much more often here than they were in Journey. But I found this to work quite well, both in terms of readability, and in terms of emulating actual speech and thoughts. Also, there are no chapters in Death.
Every thing else is what you'd expect from Celine after reading Journey. The bipolar nature of the work--it will make you laugh, then twenty pages later you'll be crying. There's plenty of humor. There's plenty of sexual escapades. Plenty of other little adventures that you'll enjoy reading about.
Oh yeah...also, there is less blatant philosophizing in this book. In Journey he'd go off on a rant about how people are terrible, and how society is evil, and how he believes in nothing. Don't worry! Those themes/ideas are all present here, he just doesn't come out and say it, rather, he shows them.
So...if you've read Journey and liked it, I strongly suggest you read Death.
If you haven't read Journey to the End of the Night, I suggest reading that first. It's not completely necessary. I think that you'll enjoy this book more if you've read Journey. Journey is perhaps the more readable of the two (at least the more traditionally readable). But if you want to read this and then do Journey be my guest, let me know how it goes.
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