Louis-Ferdinand Celine - Collected Works (16 books)

* Louis-Ferdinand Celine - Collected Works (16 books)

LOUIS-FERDINAND CÉLINE (1894–1961) remains one of the most controversial figures in twentieth-century French literature.  A physician by training and a veteran of the First World War, Céline transformed his experiences of war, colonialism, poverty, and illness into a radically new literary voice.  His writing is marked by an abrasive pessimism, a relentless focus on human suffering, and—most distinctively—a spoken, rhythmic prose that shattered the conventions of literary French.  While his later life and virulently antisemitic pamphlets have rightly cast a long moral shadow over his reputation, Céline’s influence on modern narrative style and literary modernism was profound.

Céline’s breakthrough novel, JOURNEY TO THE END OF THE NIGHT (1932), is widely regarded as his masterpiece and one of the defining novels of the century.  Told through the disillusioned voice of Ferdinand Bardamu, it traces a bleak journey from the trenches of World War I to colonial Africa, industrial America, and the slums of Paris.  What distinguishes the work is not its episodic plot but its corrosive vision of humanity: war is meaningless slaughter, colonialism is exploitation, and modern life is ruled by greed and fear.  His second major novel, DEATH ON THE INSTALLMENT PLAN (1936), turns inward, recounting a nightmarish childhood and adolescence in prewar Paris.  More fragmented and stylistically extreme than Journey, the novel deepens Céline’s obsession with humiliation, failure, and psychological damage.

From 1937 Céline wrote a series of antisemitic polemical works in which he advocated a military alliance with Nazi Germany.  He continued to publicly espouse antisemitic views during the German occupation of France, and after the Allied landing in Normandy in 1944, he fled to Germany and then Denmark where he lived in exile.  He was convicted of collaboration by a French court in 1951 but was pardoned by a military tribunal soon after.

After the Second World War, Céline produced a final trilogy — CASTLE TO CASTLE (1957), NORTH (1960), and RIGODON (1969) — often referred to as the "German trilogy".  These works fictionalize his flight through Germany and Denmark after the collapse of the Nazi regime, blending autobiography with delirium and self-justification.  Though these late novels are inseparable from Céline’s political disgrace, they also represent the culmination of his stylistic experiment: a literature driven by voice, rhythm, and emotional urgency rather than plot or moral reassurance.

Beyond his novels, Céline’s non-fiction and theatrical experiments extend his abrasive, anti-literary project into forms that parody culture itself.  THE CHURCH: A COMEDY IN FIVE ACTS (1933) skewers institutional authority through farce, reducing spiritual and social rituals to grotesque performance and exposing what Céline saw as their hollowness.  BALLETS WITHOUT MUSIC, WITHOUT DANCERS, WITHOUT ANYTHING (1959) pushes this negation further: a series of sketch-like pieces that mock artistic convention by stripping spectacle down to voice, rhythm, and bile, turning absence into provocation.  In CONVERSATIONS WITH PROFESSOR Y (1955), Céline stages a combative dialogue about style, criticism, and his own reputation, defending his fractured prose and oral cadence while attacking literary orthodoxy.  Taken together, these works show Céline relentlessly dismantling established genres, using satire, polemic, and self-mythologizing to argue that literature must abandon decorum and confront modern disillusion head-on.


The following books are in PDF and/or ePUB format as noted:

== FICTION ==

* Castle to Castle [tr. Manheim] (Carroll & Graf, 1968) – PDF^
* Castle to Castle [tr. Manheim] (Penguin, 1976) – ePUB
* Death on Credit [tr. Manheim] (Alma Books, 2017) – ePUB
* Death on the Installment Plan [tr. Manheim] (New Directions, 1966] – ePUB
* Fable for Another Time [tr. Hudson] (Nebraska, 2003) – ePUB
* Guignol's Band [tr. Frechtman & Nile] (Alma Classics, 2012) – ePUB
* Journey to the End of the Night [tr. Manheim] (New Directions, 2006) – ePUB
* Journey to the End of the Night [tr. Marks] (New Directions, 1960) – PDF^
* London Bridge [tr. Di Bernardi] (Alma Classics, 2012) – ePUB
* North [tr. Manheim] (Dalkey Archive, 1996) – PDF^
* North [tr. Manheim] (Penguin, 1976) – ePUB
* Rigadoon [tr. Manheim] (Delacorte, 1974) – ePUB
* Rigadoon [tr. Manheim] (Penguin, 1975) – PDF^
* War [tr. Mandell] (New Directions, 2024) – ePUB

== DRAMA ==

* The Church: A Comedy in Five Acts [tr. Spitzer & Green] (Green Integer, 2003) – PDF

== OTHER ==

* Ballets without Music, without Dancers, without Anything [tr. Christensen] (Green Integer, 1999) – PDF
* Conversations with Professor Y [tr. Luce] (Dalkey Archive, 2006) – PDF^
* Mea Culpa & The Life and Work of Semmelweis [tr. Parker] (Howard Fertig, 1979) – PDF^
* School for Corpses [tr. Kuragin] (n.p., 2016) – PDF
* Trifles for a Massacre [tr. Anon.]  (Aaargh, 2006) – PDF

PDF^ courtesy of @Mohamed5438


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