The sequel to Celine's extraordinary Voyage to the End of the Night, this novel has never quite won the place its predecessor did, and keeps, but it is very typical Celine nevertheless. It is strongly autobiographical, like most of his work, but his personal fantasies - erotic, paranoid, violent - make it as much surreal as realist. The time factor is fluid, with leaps to and fro and sudden gushes of reminiscence, while the style is so free and at times so lurid that you might be tempted to include Celine among the Expressionists. His experiences as a doctor in a slum area of Paris were, in any case, surreal enough in their own right, though his pro-Nazi stance and notorious anti-Semitism were later to bring him into disgrace. How much, I wonder, did Genet owe to this book?
Brian Fallon