Céline, Tod auf Raten

Paris around 1900. Young Ferdinand grows up in a narrow Parisian passage where his mother runs a small fashion shop. His father is a choleric insurance clerk who considers his son a failure. Céline portrays Ferdinand's parents and the other merchants as typical, perpetually overlooked petty bourgeois, harboring a bitter resentment towards everyone else, both above and below them. Ferdinand drops out of various schools, goes to England, and is unable to establish a life there either. He returns to France and eventually becomes a doctor in a Parisian slum. Céline denounces the meanness with which those struggling for their existence turn against one another. Just as with "Journey to the End of the Night," he expands the French literary language with "Death on Installments" to encompass all shades of oral expression. He employs every register, from the poetic to the vulgar – a shock at the time. The novel is considered one of the most influential works of the 20th century alongside "Journey to the End of the Night." Its cynical harshness, desperate longing, and grim humor, captured in a prose full of rhythmic momentum, made it world-famous. Hinrich Schmidt-Henkel has translated the book with a new title (previously "Death on Credit"), supplemented the omissions of earlier versions, and written an afterword.