Death on the Installment Plan
Death on the Installment Plan
Author: Louis-Ferdinand Céline
Desc: Published in rapid succession in the middle 1930s Journey to the End of the Night and Death on the Installment Plan 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 comedy." Death on the Installment Plan is the story of young Ferdinand's first 18 years. His life is one of hatred of the grinding struggle of small shopkeepers to survive of childhood sensations and fantasies – lusty scatological violent but also poetic. There is a running battle with his ineffectual insurance clerk of a father with his mother who lives and whines around the junkshop she runs for the boys benefit; there is also the superbly funny Meanwell College in England where the boy went briefly a Dickensian nightmare institution. Always there is humiliation failure and boredom at least until he teams up with the "scientist" des Pereires. This inventor con-man incorrigible optimist – whose last project is to grow enormous potatoes by electricity – rescues him if only temporarily; for the reader he is one of the most lovable charlatans in French literature.