All this is served up with Céline's wit and cynicism, although his characteristic slangy style isn't operating at full power, and there is a stab at a plot. It's like All Quiet on the Western Front, Heart of Darkness and The Grapes of Wrath squeezed into one budget edition.

It has a huge scope, full of pent-up experience and dark lyricism, starting off with the first world war (where Céline served as a professional soldier), encompassing the French African colonies and the industrial might of Detroit (again drawing on the author's own travels). Journey to the End of Night is the most novel-like of Céline's writings. Trotsky, Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir were fans (how the left loved him then). With typical immodesty, Céline felt he was robbed of the Prix Goncourt (won by the now obscure Guy Mazeline) but it didn't matter. Published in 1932, it made him an instant literary star. Journey to the End of Night is Céline's first novel. In Guignol's Band and its sequel London Bridge, you really have to pay close attention to the action to know exactly what's going on, although it's the ride with language that you're paying for – what the French critics often refer to as Céline's 'délire'. So, boosted by his antiwar spleen and snarling at authority, Céline pulls off the trick of being Henry Miller, John Steinbeck and James Joyce all at the same time. But the straightforward language is coupled, especially in the mid-period work, with a modernist disdain for clear exposition and holding the loathsome bourgeois reader's hand. The often colloquial, coarse and simple vocabulary he employed (his man-of-the-people credentials, the telling-it-like-it-is, although Céline also has a Captain Haddock-like talent for recherché invective) is heightened by the absence of long, aristocratic, Proustian sentences.

His popularity was based on two opposing elements in his work. Céline has always had a loyal if small, following in the US with the beats and other beardy counterculture intellectuals (they like to skip over the Jew-bashing, but hey, Ezra Pound got away with it too).

Journey into the night celine