Death on the Installment Plan

Death on the Installment Plan is a companion volume to Louis-Ferinand Céline's earlier novel Journey to the End of Night. Published in rapid succession in the middle 1930s, these two books shocked European literatue and world consciousness. Nominally fiction but more rightly called “creative confessions,” they told of the author's childhood in excoriating Paris slums, of serves 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.”Louis-Ferdinand Celine's second novel continues the style of black humor and the delirious but immediate prose that made the author instantly famous in his native France in the aftermath of World War I. Celine's goal was to create a kind of literature that described people in honest terms, unembellished by the conventions of fiction, no matter how mean and crummy they were, and to portray them in the real language of everyday life and thought. He succeeds darkly and brilliantly in Death on the Installment Plan, yet it is also a sweet kind of book, a young boy's coming-of-age tale, struggling with his parents and looking for his own kind of personal freedom.