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| Death on the Installment Plan | 
| Author: Louis Celine
Creator: Ralph Manheim
Publisher: New Directions Publishing Corporation
Category: Book
List Price: $18.95
Buy Used: $4.12
You Save: $14.83 (78%)
New (25) Collectible (1) from $10.13
Avg. Customer Rating:  31 reviews
Sales Rank: 134554
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 592
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.2
Dimensions (in): 7.8 x 5.2 x 1.5
ISBN: 0811200175
Dewey Decimal Number: 813
EAN: 9780811200172
ASIN: 0811200175
Publication Date: June 1971
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Condition: Softcover. Ex-library with usual marks. Water ruffling throughout the book, otherwise very readible copy.
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Amazon.com Review
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.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 26 more reviews...
 Better than Journey... July 3, 2008
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
I hesitate to declare favorites (favorite movie, favorite book, etc.) Why hesitate? For one, I'm not even sure which ones are my favorite. More importantly, just because I like something doesn't mean you're going to like it. So I will not tell you that this is my favorite book of all time(even though it is). Rather, I will attempt to set down some guideline to help you to determine whether or not to purchase Death on the Installment.
First, let me ask you: have you read 'Journey to the End of the Night'? If the answer is yes (and if you liked it) then my responce to you is go ahead and read Death. Death is very similar to Journey, only Death takes place earlier in the life of Celine/Bardamu.
Plot (yes, there is one...kinda):
The book begins with a grown Bardamu, practicing medicine in the suburbs of Paris. Soon the action flashes back to his childhood, which is what the rest of the book is about. Like Journey, this book follows the narrator as he moves around to various destinations, including a number of apprenticeships in Paris, boarding school in England, and a farm. There are developed characters besides Bardamu; there are his parents, his uncle, and (best of all) a crazy Inventor who takes young Bardamu under his wing.
It was Bukowski who pointed me towards Celine. He praised Journey, but he said nothing about Death. Death was unavailable to me, and after I was done with Journey I tried to read Guignol's Band. I couldn't read it though due to the frequent incoherent streamofconscious rants (and perhaps because it wasn't a Manheim Translation). But then I moved and found Death on Credit (same...Credit is just the UK title, whereas it's installment plan in US), read it, and liked it even better than Journey. There are one or two short parts of surreal/hallucinatory sequences. Even those are short; 98% of the book I would describe as concrete events writen coherently.
Celine has changed his style a little with his second book. Ellipses are used much more often here than they were in Journey. But I found this to work quite well, both in terms of readability, and in terms of emulating actual speach and thoughts. Also, there are no chapters in Death.
Every thing else is what you'd expect from Celine after reading Journey. The bipolar nature of the work--it will make you laugh, then twenty pages later you'll be crying. There's plenty of humor. There's pleanty of sexual escapades. Plenty of other little adventures that you'll enjoy reading about.
Oh yeah...also, there is less blatant philosophying(?) in this book. In Journey he'd go off on a rant about how people are terrible, and how society is evil, and how he believes in nothing. Don't worry! Those themes/ideas are all present here, he just doesn't come out and say it, rather, he shows them.
So...if you've read Journey and liked it, I strongly suggest you read Death.
If you haven't read Journey to the End of the Night, I suggest reading that first. It's not completely necessary. I think that you'll enjoy this book more if you've read Journey. Journey is perhaps the more readable of the two (at least the more traditionally readable). But if you want to read this and then do Journey be my guest, let me know how it goes.
This book might be, but probably shouldn't be, compaired to--Huck Finn, Ham on Rye (Bukowski), Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, A Raw Youth (Dostoevsky).
IT'S UP TO YOU TO READ THE BEST & SKIP THE REST August 12, 2007
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
It's the real deal ... read it ... Celine's created a narrator who can relate what he observes so that you see it too ... not so common ... read the 5-star reviews ... a big THANK YOU to John Dolan for writing reviews about Celine !! (all wannabe savvy readers should IMMEDIATELY seek out www.exile.ru to read Mr. Dolan's Celine reviews in eXile #206, 27 Jan 05 and eXile #174, 18 Sep 03)
 Banal drudgery December 22, 2006
2 out of 21 found this review helpful
Ignore the undeserving pseudointellectual hype surrounding this book. It is nothing but a displeasureable collection of banal observations and anecdotes, not the dark comedy which others profess it to be.
Dark, Bleak And Yet All So Brilliant! December 14, 2006
6 out of 6 found this review helpful
In the spotlight review, one of the reviwers 'Bruce Kendall' has written an excellent review. I recommend viewers to read it: He hits the novel right on the nail. There are a few novelist's whose works I admire greatly: Fyodor Dostoevsky, Mark Twain, and Louis-Ferdinand Celine. I first read Celine many years ago at the urging of a friend while in college. And I am forever grateful. Having first read "Journey to the End of Night," I pored headlong into Celine's Masterpiece [to me anyway] of "Death on the Installment Plan." And I must say [and write] that this is one of the greatest novels of this century.
This is one of those books you take down from your library shelf every so often and read. It's that great a novel. This is a novel that is funny in many ways, and yet very, very dark. Many who have written about Celine's style of writing write that he shows his disdain for humanity. Not so, his love for humanity is by writing both his disdain and love. He does not sugar-coat his writing. You the reader are given the full blunt force of his words. Celine's raging at humanity and the world are given full vent. You understand what he is writing about: Because he lets his words pour forth in unrelenting bucketfulls of rage. To whom you may ask? To the world.
However, Celine can be as hilarious as he is dark. Celine gives an honest description of the world around him. No one is spared. And this is what makes his novel so great and profound. You know that the venom he is spewing forth is an honest assessment of the human condition as he sees it. The pain of the world that Celine writes about is not a happy one; but it is a very truthful one. The world Celine writes about is the world of his experience; and the reality of a world that is suffering. And although he is suffering along with it, he is also struggling to stay above the morass. I highly recommend this great novel. My words don't do it any justice. It is a must read: Especially for today. [Stars: 5+]
Aesthetically pleasing. Theoretically important. Absurdly relevant. August 14, 2006
13 out of 14 found this review helpful
The greatest novel of one of the greatest novelists of all time.
You would have to write a book longer than Celine's novel to do any justice to analyzing it. Thus I was shocked to find the Wikipedia article about this book was about five sentences long. I dropped what I was doing and spouted off a slightly-edited paragraph about the themes of the novel. It's a flawed and cursory view of a book that is difficult to put into words, but I'll offer it here.
"It offers a profound vision of the nature of individual human existence: rooted in loneliness, pettiness, and inertia. The antiheroic genius of Bardamu's search for a livable life in early 20th century Paris forms a direct literary metaphor for modern humanity: to search and search again for happiness and meaning in a complex world and to oftentimes come up empty. Or more precisely: to find words, stories, experiences, and ideas that stretch the boundaries of consciousness while providing little or no structure with which to assign any meaning to life as a whole. Life becomes merely a subjective personal experience in the midst of madness and savagery: beautiful in itself but with overtones of profound suffering and a lack of moral prerogatives, and at the mercy of the strange human forces that are both within and without. We become our own history, and our own suffering, and as as such we live: accumulating the pain, happiness, confusion, and death that life allows us to have on installment. Even if it will all be repossessed at the end, when it becomes less than a dream. And that is a moment we all live for."
The modern world belongs to Celine. As it more closely conforms to his vision of a future with little hope, a past with veiled lies and atrocities, and an incredible yet painful and ephemeral present, we see that his vision has only become stronger when referring to the world beyond his immediate comprehension or even prediction.
This is a fascinating work of art by a writer at the height of his powers. It belongs on the bookshelf of anyone who has ever cared about the realities of human existence.
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