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Death on the Installment Plan (ND Paperbook)

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Description

Death on the Installment Plan is a companion volume to Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s earlier novel, Journey to the End of the Night. Published in rapid succession in the middle 1930s, these two books shocked European literature and world consciousness. Nominally fiction but more rightly called “creative confessions,” they told of the author’s childhood in excoriating Paris slums, of service in the mud wastes of World War I and African jungles. Mixing unmitigated despair with Gargantuan comedy, they also created a new style, in which invective and obscenity were laced with phrases of unforgettable poetry. Céline’s influence revolutionized the contemporary approach to fiction. Under a cloud for a period, his work is now acknowledged as the forerunner of today’s “black humor.” Read more

Publisher ‏ : ‎ New Directions (January 17, 1971)


Language ‏ : ‎ English


Paperback ‏ : ‎ 592 pages


ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0811200175


ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 72


Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.18 pounds


Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.2 x 1.6 x 8.1 inches


Best Sellers Rank: #75,988 in Books (See Top 100 in Books) #233 in Dark Humor #2,743 in Classic Literature & Fiction #6,371 in Literary Fiction (Books)


#233 in Dark Humor:


#2,743 in Classic Literature & Fiction:


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Top Amazon Reviews

    • Better than Journey...
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. ... show more
Reviewed in the United States on July 3, 2008 by Brad Hoevel
    • Wild, Unusual, and Unique
This is the sequel to Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s autobiography Journey to the End of Night. This is not meant to be a complete blow-by-blow truthful account of his childhood. It’s too precise with long bouts of dialogue and wild abuse of ellipsis to fully make this a comprehensive chronological book. Say that it is emotionally accurate to the author’s growing up and trying to succeed in the slums of Paris around the turn of the previous century. The action often moves into fantasy and the style becomes deliberately rougher. Sentences disintegrate to hook the taste of the crawling world of the Paris slums. The sleazy stories of families whose destiny is ruled by their own stupidity and greed. I’m sure many people would become frustrated by this novel's bizarre style, dips into fantasy, and otherwise amoral tone, however it offers a profound vision of the nature of human existence for the socio-economically deprived, rooted in suffering and inertia. The book expresses ideas that stretch the limitations of perception while providing almost no structure to assign any meaning to life as a whole. ... show more
Reviewed in the United States on February 12, 2021 by Daniel J. Mooney
    • Took a while to get going but great when it did.
I enjoyed this ... but still it felt like it took a long time to get going... didn't really feel like I got in to it until about half way through... definitely had some great bits though... peculiar writing style too!
Reviewed in the United States on September 14, 2017 by Howard
    • A Roller Coaster Ride
Read Celine in my youth and still re-reading. "Mort a Credit" is not as conceptually bright as "Journey," 1934, but it is still, despite being a bit dated, (1936), a hell of a roller coaster ride. Young readers should know where a lot of modernist energy sprung in the middle of the century - I talk mostly of Americans like Mailer, Miller, even Roth - each has ironically acknowledged indebtedness to Celine who is now discredited justifiably as an Anti-Semite. The book now reviewed has none of that. Every group and class takes a beating. He expressed a stern and unrelenting pessimism in the bleak period between the wars. His characters are largely from the Nineteenth Century Western Canon and are kind of memorialized as are those of Dickens and others. A recommended read if one is trying to understand France during the Great Depression and also an inimitable style feeding subsequent contributions. ... show more
Reviewed in the United States on July 12, 2014 by Jim
    • Celine's Anti-Bildungsroman; or How I Learned to Let Go and Write in the Vulgate
One of my top ten favorite novels. Reads wonderfully with the famous typographical fetish of the humble ellipsis. Philip Roth called Celine his Proust, so if you love Roth, I'm sure Celine'll make for a beautiful addition to your bookcase. When you finish, you'll feel a noticeable void, for no longer will Celine's mixture of vulgar polemic and poetic vision grace your once-virgin eyeballs. All in all, this review is a bit of an over selling of a novel that essentially taught me twenty new phrases involving the word "s***". PS: There are a number of lines in this novel that would make for nonpretentious epigraphs to any novel or story! ... show more
Reviewed in the United States on November 17, 2015 by Amazon Customer
    • yep
I have to disagree with the reviewer who said that there was no connection whatsoever between Bukowski and Celine. I think fans of Bukowski will certainly like this book, and it is very clear Bukowski was influenced by Celine's prose. The difference is that Celine tends to be far more pessimistic and full of hatred for everyone, but he is also more poetic in his observation. ... show more
Reviewed in the United States on June 9, 2004 by Amazon Customer
    • Almost as good as Voyage au bout de la nuit (Journey to the end of the night)
Mort a credit (Death on the Installment Plan) is at the very top of French writing. I'm biased ... Celine likes to use ellipsis ... always with the dots! I love them. The young Ferdinand has a dirty bum ... never enough time to keep it clean ... the country girls and their athletic bums, and the English boarding school bum ... and the crafty mentor inventor. You don't need me or any screeching poser of a book reviewer to tell you if a book is any good or not ... think for yourself. And read for yourself, and make-up your own mind. I've read many book reviews ... if I'd taken their advice ... I'd never have read the damn book. ... show more
Reviewed in the United States on December 30, 2011 by WA Ridley

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