Death on the Installment Plan

Written by Louis-Ferdinand Celine

Narrated by David Colacci

Death on the Installment Plan is a companion volume to Louis-Ferinand Celine's earlier novel Journey to the End of 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. Celine'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."

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tantor Media, Inc
• Translator: Ralph Manheim
• Release date: Apr 21, 2020
• ISBN: 9781515943075

Reviews for Death on the Installment Plan

[burritapal · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This could have gained more stars, but the misogyny, the racism, is hard to take. This narrator (the author) was born to a couple who didn't have the means or the sanity to bring him up. Every day was drama, yelling, martyrdom. Naturally, with the father more or less telling the kid he was a POS every day, the kid couldn't amount to anything, which made the father yell more, the mother cry, imploring him to calm down, and both of them constantly on their"death beds" from working their fingers to the Bone, trying to support the family. There are some really hilarious parts, nevertheless:
P.54
"August, my father, read La Patrie. He sat down beside my crib. She came over and kissed him. His storm was subsiding... he stood up and went over to the window. He pretended to be looking for something down in the court. He let a resounding fart. The tension was down. She let a little fart in sympathy and fled kittenishly into the kitchen."

Here's an example of the blatant racism:
P.340
"Courtials' little handbooks were translated into a good many languages, they were even sold in Africa. One of his correspondents was a real Nigger, the chief of the sultanate in upper UBanghi Shari - Chad. That boy was wild about elevators of every kind. They were his dream, his mania..."

And he lost no love for the faithful pigeons that loved him, that went up in Courtials' balloons as part of his show, and when there was no money to feed them, too bad, so sad:
P.419
"So I go upstairs for my animals [the pigeons]... I bring them down. I balance the basket on my head... I go out by the Rue Montpensier... I cross the Carrousel... When I get to the Quai Voltaire, I look for a good place... I don't see a soul... On the bank at the bottom of the stairs... I pick up a big cobblestone... I tie it on... I look around again... I pick it up in both hands and throw it in the drink... As far out as I can... It didn't make any noise... I did it automatic..."

[stillatim · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Once again I'm left feeling a bit let down by Celine. Some of that is his fault, and some of it is not.

Not his fault: that he's billed as the great nihilist of modernism, but seems to me a good deal less nihilistic, or interesting, than any number of other modernists; that writing in everyday lingo is no longer shocking or interesting; that talking about fucking is no longer shocking or interesting; that Mannheim translates him--accurately, for all I know--to sound like the mildly grumpier brother of Holden "Golly Gee Mister" Caulfield.

His fault: that this thing is so massively over-long; that the repetition doesn't go anywhere.

Journey to the End of the Night was just dull, I thought, but DotIP has some genuinely fabulous portions: basically, anytime we're thrown into a truly hallucinatory 'depiction' of the world. The realism is just realism with ellipses; the hallucinatory passages are something else altogether. Occasionally Ferdinand will tell us a bit of cod medieval-romance, the parody of which isn't so fascinating, nor informative: if you don't pick up on the fact that this is a picaresque and that it is, like Don Quixote, taking aim at its contemporaries, reading about Gwendor won't bring it home to you.

Otherwise there are four main narratives--Ferdinand's time with his family; his time with the jeweler; his time at school in England; his time with the balloonist and inventor Courtial. Which you prefer will be largely a matter of taste. I found the father figures, whether biological or balloonist, boring. Others might not. The problem is that finding Courtial boring makes the second half of the book boring, and I really would have preferred to just re-read the first section here, where a middle-aged Ferdinand goes on his rounds and rants about the sink that is humanity. More ranting, less narrative, please.

[richardderus · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Céline hates with the intensity, the narrowness, and the purity of the Large Hadron Collider's accelerated particles. It is not comfortable to encounter this in my old age; I was receptive to it in my own Age of Rage, though, and was well-served by reading the bitter and bilious thing then.If you haven't been here before middle age, I wouldn't advise making the trip.

[poetontheone · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

In this novel, there is still the wry nihilism that we saw in Journey, however it is infused with the strangest humor. Many others have noted that this novel is simultaneously bleak and hilarious, and that couldn't be more true, Some of the best novels balance those two tones precisely, as Céline certainly does here. I wouldn't say that this is one of the best novels I have read. I would even say that I liked it significantly less than Journey. Still, it contains the same markers of formal innovation and tonal mastery that make Céline great. His clearly autobiographical protagonist is surrounded by such an unbelievably bizarre cast of complete oddballs that I found myself chuckling or smacking my skull at the sheer weirdness of many of the situations our narrator finds himself in. The only drawback, though it is a significant one, is that Céline lingers too long on some situations and characters within the book, particularly the time spent with the paranoid balloonist. I could soak in the prose here all day, but perhaps a bit more momentum was needed in some sections of this book.

[dinoreader · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

If you have read Journey to the End of the Night, you almost have to read this book to complete your understanding of Celine's importance to French and American literature.

Regardless, it starts slow and the constant use of ellipsis is sometimes maddening, sometimes distracting.

The story's momentum grows to the last paragraphs; that is a good thing.

I read this to see what was meant by the many mentions I read in other articles and in stories by other writers talking about Celine's challenging the French literary establishment and his continuation of Knut Hamsun's style of writing. I can report that most of what is important to a modern reader or writer can be found by reading Journey; however, if you want the whole story, want to appreciate how Celine challenged the existing conventions and want to see an inspired writer do less than great work but still historically significant work, read this.

In the end, it was a slog a good bit of the way, Celine went to excess in this novel but I am very glad I read it.

[hadriantheblind · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Simultaneously one of the most depressing and hilarious novels I've read. The author has creative sex metaphors that would make fan-fiction authors weep.

The style has changed considerably since "Journey to the End of the Night". There is still the same nihilistic mocking tone, the paranoia, the distrust of everything. But instead of tense packed essays, this novel is studded with ellipses like bullet holes. See Celine taking out a Chicago typewriter and blasting down the ennui of interwar bourgeois and proletarian France with manic laughter. He flits from thought to thought with a frenzied grace.

Many physicians - the author included - have to have the blackest humor and laugh in the face of death and decay. Otherwise they'd spend all day weeping.

[bookomaniac-1 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Een Bildungsroman à la Celine: flashback naar jeugdjaren, grauw beeld van de werkelijkheid.

[lriley_43 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

As titles go--probably this is my favorite. It almost rolls off the tongue. As the sequel to Journey to the End of the Night (another great title) it's almost but not quite as good. That's an opinion and to be taken for what it's worth. In any case like Journey there are things auto-biographical about it. The Ferdinand Bardamu of the first book is here just Ferdinand. The Bardamu of Journey begins his story on the front lines of World War I. The Ferdinand as 'Death' begins is a child in a small alley of shopfronts in a Parisian working class slum whose parents are eking out a living--the father going from job to job as a lowly paid clerical worker and the mother selling knickknacks and mending lace. They live off noodles and other bland foods because noodles are odorless and because lace is susceptible to picking up odors. They are petit-bourgeois--conservative by nature as are their mostly mean-spirited neighbors and Ferdinand's parents aspire to Ferdinand's being just like themselves--a small time shopkeeper. To this end they send him to England to learn English at a boarding school (Meanwell College) which they think will be helpful to him later on his life. Ferdinand even as a child though carries along with him his resentments. He arrives at the boarding school run by an older man Mr. Merrywin and his much younger wife Nora and the more they try to get Ferdinand to learn and to interact the more Ferdinand obstinately refuses despite which he begins to pick up a language he refuses to speak and despite his unexpressed attraction to Nora. There are other problems at the school--and little to eat because the school is going under and so economizing on everything. It all ends disastrously with the school closing and Nora's suicide. From there back to France--only things are not going so well there either. His father is increasingly prone to anger and the violent expression of it which eventually leads to a physical confrontation and Ferdinand is now out on the street. His Uncle Edouard takes him in but he soon finds work with a Courtial des Pereires one of the most if not the most unique characters in all of Celine's work. Courtial is an inventor, a con man and a charlatan. He is a man of big ideas and though these ideas tend to flop altogether or get him into trouble with the neighbors or the law Courtial is always irrepressible. He never gives up--he simply finds another idea and/or another home. Courtial's wife on the other hand is a real battleaxe, plug-ugly and exasperated by a life full of Courtial's shenanigans. Eventually though that life catches up with des Perieres and like Nora he kills himself. Without a doubt it's the most graphic and at the same time most hilarious suicide that I've ever come across in print. On a lonely and wintry country backroad in front of a neighbors' farm Courtial has stuck the barrel of a shotgun in his mouth and blown half of his head off--the remainder of which is left frozen to the road. Ferdinand and Mrs. des Pereires are left to clean up the mess tugging and pulling at the head and body frozen to the road the body bent like a pretzel. The farmers very reluctantly after a lot of negotiation eventually lend then a wheel barrow and a shovel and they're able to take the body back to their home upon which they are soon being interrogated by the police. Ferdinand once again returns to his uncle but he has made up his mind to break free of his parents and his past life. He will join the army.Celine as a writer is known for his black humor, his pre-existentialist kind of philosophizing which is all here in full force. His sense of exaggeration was unique for his time--somewhat borrowed from Rabelais and a precursor in some ways to the Magical Realism of some of the writers of the Latin Boom. At times he can be surprisingly lyrical. He moves effortlessly between mood and event oftentimes running through a whole gamut of emotion and at the same time his was a brilliantly comedic voice. A disturbed individual in some ways but a truly great writer.