Jayakrishnan’s Reviews > Journey to the End of the Night > Status Update

Back on this book again. Bought a physical copy of it. I left my old copy of it at my parents and it might have been eaten by moths.

What can I say? Celine is Celine.

Bardamu delivers an anti-war and anti-French tirade and then falls in with an approaching army parade.

I never saw Princhard again. He had the same trouble as all intellectuals—he was ineffectual. He knew too many things, and they confused him.

When you're up there, you've got to join in, come to life, act a part, take the plunge or clear out. Especially the women demanded a show, the bitches had no use at all for clumsy amateurs. Unquestionably war went straight to their ovaries, they demanded heroes, and if you weren't a hero you had to pretend to be one or be prepared for the most ignominious fate.

"When you're up there, you've got to join in, come to life, act a part, take the plunge or clear out. Especially the women demanded a show, the bitches had no use at all for clumsy amateurs. Unquestionably war went straight to their ovaries, they demanded heroes, and if you weren't a hero you had to pretend to be one or be prepared for the most ignominious fate."

"Cloistered in their official misery as in an oozing dungeon, those aged workers ruminated the layer of shit that long years of servitude deposit on men's souls. Impotent hatreds grown rancid in the pissy idleness of dormitories. They employed their last quavering energies in hurting each other a little more, in destroying what little pleasure and life they had left."

Celine nails it every single page of this book.

"I hadn't found out yet that mankind consists of two very different races, the rich and the poor. It took me ... and plenty of other people ... twenty years and the war to learn to stick to my class and ask the price of things before touching them, let alone setting my heart on them."

He had the same trouble as all intellectuals?he was ineffectual.

The people are always dying to die! That's the way they are!