About seven or eight weeks ago, I checked out 'Death on the Installment Plan' by Louis-Ferdinand Celine from the public library. I had been intending to read this book for some time, as I had read another Celine novel a few years past and had claimed it as one of my favorites--before I even had finished the first five pages, I believe.
Except I did not voraciously devour Celine: his words, his style, his embleakened blackness (full disclosure: "embleakened" is made up)--not at all as I anticipated I would. There were reasons, I am sure. Reasons: I had also checked out another book on the same day (Kundera!) and had taken yet one more on loan from a friend. I began to read the Celine almost immediately, but I had not progressed very far when I began to eschew Celine for the others. By the time I completed 'Slowness' by Kundera, I had purchased another book: 'Difficult Loves' by Italo Calvino--a collection of wonderfully-detailed and lovingly written short stories by the Cuban-born Italian master. This tome summoned my fancy, and before I could even explain a word to Celine--an apology... a yell of "i'll be back! i promise!" as I was being swept away on the train to Rome...anything at all--I was happier with Calvino. Life was several shades brighter.
Initially, when I hesitated about going on with the Celine, I was not making a value judgment per se, rather I was concerned mostly for my mood. While Celine is incredibly funny, he is more consistently, simply--dark. Charred. Blackened. Left in the oven for four days at four hundred and forty degrees. Then zapped in the microwave. You know, for good measure. I was concerned for my mood, I say. So concerned that I actually had a brief affair with a collection of love sonnets by Pablo Neruda, and I am certainly not a "poetry person" mind you, my fair reader. I gather that I was really tightening up at Celine's endless declarations that every human being (especially he himself) is a dirty scoundrel, a blackguard. I needed to breathe, and my air had been too thickened by venomous, sickly declarations on the avariciousness of humanity.
I was not enjoying Celine. How could this be?! A Supreme talent! Let us zoom out, hold on a longer shot for a bit: some more context: Around roughly the same time I acquired Celine, I had started to work four nights a week doing overnight shifts at an opulent condominium building in downtown Minnepolis. Most of my "work" consisted of watching "Seinfeld" and "Law & Order: Criminal Intent" reruns, reading, writing, or raiding the building's custodial supplies for my personal, at-home use. In any case, I noticed that I was entirely, utterly devoid of any interest in reading the Celine while I was sitting at work. Yet, I would bring out the Celine while zooming to and fro work on the train (or even ambling along on the 22-bus). Wait: it would be incorrect to say that I noticed this phenomenon at the time. This idea, this connection I want to reveal came about just tonight as I hunkered down in my bedroom in an attempt to slosh through the muddy rue de Celine. Turns out, I could not get myself to concentrate. And I know that I have been enjoying the Celine more recently, as I am finally just over one hundred pages shy of conclusion. But I finally put my fingers on the pulse of the problem: motion (or lackthereof). That is to say, I have found the book much more agreeable while being whisked about by one form of conveyance or another.
To elucidate: one key aspect of Celine's writing concerns his sense of style. He made no mistake of convincing any one he ever spoke to about his writing, that he was wholly committed to inventing and incubating a distinct style--and thereby invigorating what he viewed as a stagnant medium--writing. To give an idea of what a typical paragraph looks like in a Celine novel, here is an excerpt from 'Death':
At the venereal clinic we used to mark vertical bars on a big sheet of paper as we went along . . . That was all there was too it. A red stroke: Salvarsan. Green: mercury. And so on. The rest was routine . . . All we had to do was pump the juice into their buttocks or the bend of their arms . . . It was like larding a roast. Green! . . . Arm! Yellow . . . get those pants down! . . . Red! . . . Both buttocks . . . Another on in the ass! . . . Ditto! Bismuth! Blue! Dripping vein! Swine! Get those pants one! . . . Swab that arm! . . . The rhythm was merciless. Batches and batches of them . . . Endless lines . . . Limp cocks . . . pricks . . . dripping peckers . . . oozing. Festering . . . Starched sheets, as stiff as cardboard! Clap! . . . Queen of the world! The ass is its throne! Heated summer and winter! . . .
Celine used ellipses heavily. Even many paragraphs are not really paragraphs based on conventional definitions. They just trail off with ellipses. Sentences do not end. There are no sentences. Well, few, anyway. The connection, to get back to my point, is the rhythm. Celine's writing has a stylistic rhythm, in 'Death' at least, all its own and a reader is properly suited to read it only while traveling. Celine's exclamations bounce off the page in proper sync with the gentle, and sometimes jarring bumps created by the bus and the boulevard.
Sadly, Celine has been with me too long and through too many renewals, more than the library can handle. So I must return it tomorrow; and I am sure that I will crack it open once the bus driver's foot hits the gas.
I am curious, to anyone that might be reading: Have there been any books in your life that required a particular setting for you to effectively read them? Any comments about an author's use of style or syntax, in which any attempt at reading said author required a seventy-four degree, partly cloudy June day with a dewpoint of sixty-five degrees?
