By Louis-Ferdinand Céline
A boy's brutal Paris childhood
Subject
Themes
A middle-aged doctor working at a charity clinic on the outskirts of Paris learns that his concierge has died. He has no one left to write to, no real friends remaining, and a manuscript he cannot finish. Deciding he will tell stories instead, dangerous enough to bring people back from the ends of the world just to kill him, he begins to describe his childhood.
A middle-aged doctor working at a charity clinic on the outskirts of Paris learns that his concierge has died. He has no one left to write to, no real friends remaining, and a manuscript he cannot finish. Deciding he will tell stories instead, dangerous enough to bring people back from the ends of…
Published in 1936, the novel is set largely in the Belle Époque, the period of relative prosperity and rapid modernisation that France experienced between the late 1880s and the outbreak of the First World War in 1914. Understanding this period illuminates both the specific world Ferdinand inhabits…
Poverty in this novel is not primarily a description of material conditions, though the material conditions are rendered with extraordinary precision: the too-narrow shoes bought a size large to last two years, the suits that bag at the knees from stair-climbing, the families surviving on eighty-two…
Every adult who holds authority over Ferdinand in this novel is either incompetent, dishonest, or both. This is not a coincidence or a product of especially bad luck. The novel argues that the failure of adult authority is structural: the people placed in positions of guidance over children of…
The conventional coming-of-age story follows a recognisable arc: a young person encounters the world, suffers, learns, and arrives at a new self formed by the experience. The novel disrupts this arc with consistency and deliberateness. Ferdinand does not arrive at a new self. He arrives at the same…
The Legend of King Krogold enters the novel in the opening pages, when the adult Ferdinand reads it aloud to his dozing colleague Gustin in a riverside café. It is a mock-medieval romance about a dying prince conversing with Death, and it is also the story Ferdinand's grandmother used to teach him…
The world in which Ferdinand grows up is one of comprehensive economic transition. Old trades are dying. Hand-engraved jewellery, the kind Gorloge makes, has no market. The covered arcade of the Passage des Bérésinas, with its small shops selling notions and lace, is being displaced by department…
Ferdinand is the narrator and protagonist, a young man from a petty bourgeois Parisian family who recounts his childhood and early youth with a voice that is simultaneously furious, tender, and exhausted. He exists in two time frames: as the adult doctor-narrator framing the story from the vantage…
Auguste is Ferdinand's father, a clerk at the Coccinelle Fire Insurance Company, and one of the novel's most fully realised portraits of petty bourgeois suffering turned outward into violence. He is not a monster in any simple sense; he is a man who has been squeezed by the same forces that squeeze…
Caroline is Ferdinand's mother, a woman who limps through the entire novel on legs damaged by an old injury, and whose physical condition is a perfect emblem of what her life has done to her: she keeps moving, she absorbs the impact, she does not stop. She runs the family's lace-and-notions shop in…
Courtial des Pereires is the novel's most extravagant creation and its most complicated figure: an inventor, balloon pilot, magazine editor, and self-certified universal genius who is simultaneously a fraud, a visionary, a con man, and the most genuinely alive person Ferdinand has encountered. He…
Uncle Edouard is Caroline's brother and Ferdinand's most consistent advocate in the adult world. He runs a hardware business that deals in automobile accessories and headlights, which means he is one of the few people in the novel's orbit who has actually positioned himself to benefit from the new…
Clémence is Ferdinand's maternal grandmother, a Flemish woman of peasant stock who sells vegetables and occupies the warmest corner of his childhood. She is tough in the way that people who have actually worked the land are tough, physically capable, unsentimental about hardship, and clear-eyed…
Irène des Pereires is Courtial's wife, a compact and furious woman who has spent her marriage managing the practical consequences of her husband's ambitions. She is the real administrator of the Génitron operation: the one who handles the creditors, negotiates with the landlord, tracks down the…
Nora Merrywin is the wife of the headmaster of Meanwell College in Rochester, and the most genuinely kind adult Ferdinand encounters during his years of apprenticeship and drifting. She is warm, attentive, and physically generous in the manner of someone who has not yet been entirely ground down by…
A doctor working at a charity clinic in the Zone on the outskirts of Paris sits alone with the news that his concierge, Mme Bérenge, has died. She was old, faithful, and the last reliable presence in his life. There is no one left to write to. He contemplates writing stories instead, stories so…
Caroline walks Ferdinand to Berlope's ribbons-and-trimmings shop on the Rue de la Michodière and introduces him to the owner with a comprehensive catalogue of her son's failings: scatterbrained, disobedient, a compulsive nose-picker, unlikely to amount to much. Berlope listens, pares his nails, and…
Uncle Edouard leads Ferdinand to the Rue Elzévir to meet Monsieur Gorloge, a master engraver who works out of a fifth-floor apartment with his wife. Gorloge does rings, brooches, embossed bracelets, and repair jobs of every description. He has been waiting twelve years for the craft engraving…
Uncle Edouard decides that England is the answer. Ferdinand will be sent to a private school in Rochester called Meanwell College, run by a man named Merrywin and his wife Nora. He will learn English, broaden his horizons, and return to France in a condition better suited to employment. The channel…
Ferdinand returns from England to a household whose anxieties have not changed in his absence, only grown more worn. Auguste's rages have subsided into something worse: a grinding, repetitive monologue of grievance that runs in the background of every evening. He has worked through most of his…
Uncle Edouard finds Ferdinand a position with Courtial des Pereires, a man who operates a popular-science magazine called the Génitron from a cramped office near the Palais-Royal. Courtial is a universal inventor, or claims to be: aeronautics, agronomy, radio waves, perpetual motion, underground…
Courtial moves the entire operation to a farmhouse at Blême-le-Petit, a village north of Paris. He, Irène, and Ferdinand arrive to find the building in worse condition than described and the land in worse condition than that. The local peasants observe Courtial's plans with the silent contempt of…
Ferdinand is the narrator and protagonist, a young man from a petty bourgeois Parisian family who recounts his childhood and early youth with a voice that is simultaneously furious, tender, and exhausted. He exists in two time frames: as the adult doctor-narrator framing the story from the vantage…
Auguste is Ferdinand's father, a clerk at the Coccinelle Fire Insurance Company, and one of the novel's most fully realised portraits of petty bourgeois suffering turned outward into violence. He is not a monster in any simple sense; he is a man who has been squeezed by the same forces that squeeze…
Caroline is Ferdinand's mother, a woman who limps through the entire novel on legs damaged by an old injury, and whose physical condition is a perfect emblem of what her life has done to her: she keeps moving, she absorbs the impact, she does not stop. She runs the family's lace-and-notions shop in…
Courtial des Pereires is the novel's most extravagant creation and its most complicated figure: an inventor, balloon pilot, magazine editor, and self-certified universal genius who is simultaneously a fraud, a visionary, a con man, and the most genuinely alive person Ferdinand has encountered. He…
Uncle Edouard is Caroline's brother and Ferdinand's most consistent advocate in the adult world. He runs a hardware business that deals in automobile accessories and headlights, which means he is one of the few people in the novel's orbit who has actually positioned himself to benefit from the new…
Clémence is Ferdinand's maternal grandmother, a Flemish woman of peasant stock who sells vegetables and occupies the warmest corner of his childhood. She is tough in the way that people who have actually worked the land are tough, physically capable, unsentimental about hardship, and clear-eyed…
Irène des Pereires is Courtial's wife, a compact and furious woman who has spent her marriage managing the practical consequences of her husband's ambitions. She is the real administrator of the Génitron operation: the one who handles the creditors, negotiates with the landlord, tracks down the…
Nora Merrywin is the wife of the headmaster of Meanwell College in Rochester, and the most genuinely kind adult Ferdinand encounters during his years of apprenticeship and drifting. She is warm, attentive, and physically generous in the manner of someone who has not yet been entirely ground down by…
By Louis-Ferdinand Céline
Subject
Themes
A middle-aged doctor working at a charity clinic on the outskirts of Paris learns that his concierge has died. He has no one left to write to, no real friends remaining, and a manuscript he cannot finish. Deciding he will tell stories instead, dangerous enough to bring people back from the ends of the world just to kill him, he begins to describe his childhood.