Rigadoon Author: Louis-Ferdinand Céline Translator: Ralph Manheim French Literature Series November 1997 296 pages, 5.5 x 8.5 paperback, 1-56478-162-3 Retail Paperback Price:$13.50 Our Paperback Price: $10.80—20% OFF!

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Book Description

Completed right before his death in 1961, Rigadoon, the most compassionate of Céline's novels, explores the ravages of war and its aftermath.

Often comic and always angry, the first-person autobiographical narrator, with his wife and their cat in tow, takes the reader with him on his flight from Paris to Denmark after finding himself on the losing side of World War II. The train rides that encompass the novel are filled with madness and mercy, as Céline, a physician, aids refugees while ignoring his own medical needs.

Céline's inventive style and black humor profoundly influenced many writers who came after him, including Kurt Vonnegut, Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg and Charles Bukowski. As Kurt Vonnegut states in his introduction to this edition, "[Céline] demonstrated that perhaps half of all experience, the animal half, had been concealed by good manners. No honest writer or speaker will ever want to be polite again."

About the Author

Louis-Ferdinand Céline (1894-1961) changed French fiction permanently when he first exploded onto the literary scene in 1932 with Journey to the End of the Night and again in 1936 with Death on the Installment Plan. His vast and liberating influence on American writers can be seen in the works of Jack Kerouac, William Borroughs, Philip Roth, and Kurt Vonnegut, among others. In 1993, Dalkey Archive published his previously untranslated London Bridge and has since made available his novels North, Rigadoon, and Castle to Castle.

About the Translator

Ralph Manheim's translation for Louis-Ferdinand Céline's Castle to Castle won him the National Book Award.

Praise

"As modern readers, we should feel extremely fortunate to have this celebration of the individual human spirit struggling to survive in a world obsessed with its destruction. Manheim's translation succeeds in capturing the powerful immediacy of Céline's prose."—Library Journal

"Céline quite deliberately makes us feel the inescapable, mind-rotting horror of endless chaos, the fact of war as Americans have never known it."—Washington Post Book World

"More than most modern authors, [Céline is] able to plunge directly into the burning center, where Europe, in rage and anguish, is tearing itself apart. In so doing, he captures the heat and energy of he final holocaust better than almost anyone."—Nation

"Céline's explosive language and style is the very sign of his experience: its full impact explodes, as if by delayed reaction, before the eyes, and in the consciousness, of author, narrator, and reader alike."—Times Literary Supplement

"Lit with a flash of frighteningly lucid prophecy, and seen to be nothing less than the doom of the human race. . . . But what is oddest of all about Rigadoon, and what distinguishes it from Céline's other work, is its sense of peace, almost of consummation, at the sight of a Europe in rubble and flames."—New York Times Book Review

More Information

Also by Louis-Ferdinand Céline:
Castle to Castle
Conversations with Professor Y
London Bridge
North

Also by Ralph Manheim:
North