Journey to the End of the Night

"This is another book I read when I was very young and like my first choice I was impressed by the fact that Paris was a real city and had this underground quality to it. There could be really deeply subversive people living and working and creating here. I was particularly fascinated by Céline’s portrait of the city because Paris is one of the characters in the book. You get a real sense of what Paris looked like. Céline walked everywhere. He was a mad walker. He came from the suburbs and he lived and worked around Clichy and Courbevoie, which is a very rough suburb nowadays. He would go in and out of town and walk back and forth in many of the places that Henry Miller then lived in and walked around. It just so happens that when I first moved to Paris I lived for a year not far from Place de Clichy and I found myself going to the same places and seeing the same kinds of scenes described in the late 1920s and early 1930s, and they really seemed to be current. People hanging out in cafés and drinking madly and living much of their lives in a public sphere, outside on the streets. People often had such miserable little apartments and unheated garrets and suchlike, places that didn’t have proper bathrooms and showers, that when not at work they would spend a huge amount of time loitering or in cafés, at tables on the street. They were also discussing all sorts of things very animatedly, things that had you talked about them in many places in America you would have been considered a public danger or a marginal character or a crazy person. For example, in Paris it is considered completely normal to call yourself a communist whether you truly understand what it means to be one or not. And that was certainly not the case until not so long ago in the United States. Paris was a lot more liberal than America – you could talk about anything and say anything and that was considered completely normal."

"This novel taught me, early on, about hyperbole. The sardonic and paranoid narrator describes the tunnels in the ground left by felled trees, as he travels in French colonial Africa this way: “Whole Metro trains could have manoeuvred with ease in the hollows left by their roots.” When I read that for the first time I took it as a lesson and challenge, about description, accuracy, truth, and the powers of exaggeration to produce humour. I re-read that section of that book all the time."