Rigadoon

ReviewCéline quite deliberately makes us feel the inescapable, mind-rotting horror of endless chaos, the fact of war as Americans have never known it. (_Washington Post Book World_ ) Céline's explosive language and style is the very sign of his experience: its full impact explodes, as if by delayed reaction, before the eyes, and in the consciousness, of author, narrator, and reader alike. (_Times Literary Supplement_ ) Lit with a flash of frighteningly lucid prophecy, and seen to be nothing less than the doom of the human race. . . . But what is oddest of all about Rigadoon, and what distinguishes it from Céline's other work, is its sense of peace, almost of consummation, at the sight of a Europe in rubble and flames. (_The New York Times Book Review_ ) More than most modern authors, [Céline is] able to plunge directly into the burning center, where Europe, in rage and anguish, is tearing itself apart. In so doing, he captures the heat and energy of he final holocaust better than almost anyone. (_The Nation_ ) Manheim’s translation succeeds in capturing the powerful immediacy of Céline’s prose. (_Library Journal_ ) Product DescriptionCompleted right before his death in 1961, Rigadoon, the most compassionate of Céline's novels, explores the ravages of war and its aftermath.Often comic and always angry, the first-person autobiographical narrator, with his wife and their cat in tow, takes the reader with him on his flight from Paris to Denmark after finding himself on the losing side of World War II. The train rides that encompass the novel are filled with madness and mercy, as Céline, a physician, aids refugees while ignoring his own medical needs. Céline's inventive style and black humor profoundly influenced many writers who came after him, including Kurt Vonnegut, Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg and Charles Bukowski. As Kurt Vonnegut states in his introduction to this edition, "[Céline] demonstrated that perhaps half of all experience, the animal half, had been concealed by good manners. No honest writer or speaker will ever want to be polite again."