CELINE AS AN EXPRESSION OF JEWISH POWER

by Basil Benton

Despite his notoriety, Céline still makes the "top ten" of most lists for greatest French writer of all time, though there have been attempts to discredit and erase his towering presence from world letters. According to Haaretz, "Céline, who died in 1961, is considered the second most widely read author in France after Marcel Proust."

WORK Vs. JOBS

Office drone

by Brett Stevens

Conservatives espouse traditional (or, more accurately, eternal) values including the importance of hard work and dedication. Few ask themselves, however, if this extends to jobs. It should not, mainly because (1) jobs are not actually work in most cases and (2) jobs are the antithesis of what the value of hard work is designed to foster.

In modern Europe and the Americas, everyone — male and female — over the age of majority must attend a job. This means showing up every day from eight to five and being in the office, doing office tasks. Every person gets a cubicle or an office and a computer, maybe a title. They do this until they are sixty-five, then wonder what it meant.

MICHEL HOUELLEBECQ, FOUNDER OF NEOREACTION

Michel Houellebecq: a boon to spellcheckers the world over.

by Brett Stevens

With Michel Houellebecq in the news for his novel, Submission, it makes sense to remember his roots. He has made his name writing about the tedium of modern life and fleeting glimpses of beauty, truth, and purity that tempt people from it. His usually tragic characters cannot realize that beauty because of their broken psychologies and neuroses.

Houellebecq burst onto the scene in 1997 with Whatever, a cynically humorous book — think Louis-Ferdinand Celine or William Burroughs — about the failure of modern life. The characters struggle through pointless and boring jobs, alienating sexual relationships and dysfunctional families, all while wandering through a 21st-century dystopian wasteland that is both beautiful in its ruin and crassly plastic in the assumptions through which most people survive.

JOURNEY TO THE END OF THE NIGHT BY LOUIS-FERDINAND CÉLINE

Journey to the End of the Night
by Louis-Ferdinand Céline
New Directions (Reprint edition)
464 pages
Available for purchase from Amazon here

Reviewed by Matt Forney

Louis Ferdinand Auguste Destouches, better known by his pen name Louis-Ferdinand Céline, was one of the great writers of the 20th century. His novels profoundly explored the nihilism at the heart of Western modernity. To commemorate his birthday, we publish once again Matt Forney's classic review of what is considered his greatest work.

Four years of college taught me that not only does the ivory tower have no idea what makes good literature, they couldn’t care less; they’ll erase truly talented writers from the history books if they wander off the plantation. Case in point: the 20th century’s most reviled and imitated novelist, Louis-Ferdinand Céline. Ask an English professor about Céline and half of them will have no idea who you’re talking about, and the other half will react like you just snapped off a Hitler salute. I still remember how my junior year Early American Lit professor reacted when I told her I was reading Rigadoon: ”Wasn’t Céline a Nazi?”