Top 10 Favorite Books

Sounds like the same book. I wanted a brief description of it, and probably didn't pick the best one.

Favorite childhood book: The Black Stallion

Favorite books as an adult: A ton, but when I first read Cecils' "Textbook of Medicine" (yes, I know, a textbook, and required at that), I knew I had made the right choice for my profession. What a wonderful, and oddly serene and exciting feeling!

Not necessarily novels.
1. Journey to the End of the Night--Celine
2. Lolita--Nabokov
3. The Leopard--di Lampedusa
4. The Collected Stories--Flannery O'Connor
5. The Catcher in the Rye--Salinger
6. Ulysses--James Joyce
7. The Good Soldier--Ford
8. What We Talk About When We Talk About Love (Original Version)--Carver
9. A Handful of Dust--Waugh
10. Psychopathia Sexualis--Krafft-Ebing
Honorable Mention: Jaguars Ripped My Flesh--Tim Cahill (nonfiction travel writing)

Rgirl

RGirl, I also loved Journey to the End of the Night. Unfortunately, ever since I've read the awful antisemitic essays of Celine's, I just cannot look at this novel the same way. I realize it's silly -- I liked the book for its literary value, not for its author's human integrity, but I just can't help it. There is a level of anti-semitism I can tolerate in my favorite writers (Dostoevsky, Pushkin), but then there is just something I find too much (Gogol, Celine).

Pitchka,
Thanks for commenting on Celine. I am a huge fan of his writing and have every single book he ever worte, from JOURNEY to CONVERSATIONS WITH PROFESSOR Y to LONDON BRIDGE. The challenge for me of Celine and a lot of writers is whether you're willing to accept some truly hideous personality flaws in exchange for writing that tells the absolute truth in a way that is both phenomenal and transcendent. For me, Celine's antisemitism is the ultimate test we have to face with separating the artist from the art. For me, I couldn't care less what the artist has done as a person. All that matters to me is what's on the page, canvas, score, sculpture, whatever. I used to care about what the artist did, but as I read more and more biographies of artists whose work I loved, I came to realize that most of them had down terrible things or were horrible people in some ways--just like we all are, IMO. I think we all have horribly dark things deep down inside, but we never confront them or are forced to confront them. I think part of what makes Celine's best writing so great is that he fully accepted what a horrible man he was--and also fully accepted his good qualities. I think that's why especially his first two books, JOURNEY and DEATH ON THE INSTALLMENT PLAN are chuggy-jam with truth told in a way that virtually leaps off the page.

In Kurt Vonnegut's collection of essays, PALM SUNDAY, he discusses Celine. If you can get a copy at the library, you might find it interesting since Vonnegut talks about Celine's antisemitism in relation to his writing.

Anyway, glad to find someone else who has at least read JOURNEY. I first read it almost 20 years ago and still pick it up and just read from it. I read a section of it at my father's funeral. But my favorite chapter by Celine is in CASTLE TO CASTLE in which he talks about the death of his dog. One of the most beautiful pieces on death I've ever read.
Rgirl

The question of how to seperate art from artist is certainly a compelx one, and in theory you are absolutely correct. I am prefectly OK with ignoring whatever hideous things an artist has done in his personal life (the world hasn't rejected Carravagio after all, right?). What makes Celine different for me is the time when he was writing. Just before WWII. Now, the rational side of me knows that he probably did not make one iota of difference in how the war played out, and in how much support Hitler got. However, I cannot help feeling that he provided an extra intellectual justification to the horror.

Also, literature is different from painting, sculpture, or architecture. It's more like music or performance art in that in order to fully appreciate it (especially when we are talking about such psychological works as the Journey) you have to really become involved in it. In a way, you have to become an inhabitant of the work the author has created. In that sense it often becomes scary to be in the world created by someone whose philosphy you dispise.

Ptichka said:

Also, literature is different from painting, sculpture, or architecture. It's more like music or performance art in that in order to fully appreciate it (especially when we are talking about such psychological works as the Journey) you have to really become involved in it. In a way, you have to become an inhabitant of the work the author has created. In that sense it often becomes scary to be in the world created by someone whose philosphy you dispise.

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Believe me, I understand your concerns and it's one I wrestled with for many years. One of my favorite quotes about Wagner is, "He spun gold from the s*** of his brains." Roald Dahl, who wrote many much beloved children's books, the most well-known being JAMES AND THE GIANT PEACH hated children and was a horror of a human being. But he had a gift, the drive, and the luck to publish his stories, which apparently came from something charming in him.

I know that's a simplistic answer, but I feel the same way about Celine. Many people we revere today prolonged WWII. The US denied port to a ship carring almost 1000 Jewish refugees after the war had started in Europe, as did Cuba, and several other countries, and believe me, the US had plenty of antisemitism to go around. As for Celine, I think it is the very contrast in his nature as a physician dedicated to healing and seeing justice done in the ridiculous bueracracy of medicine versus his antisemitic feelings that make him the ideal writer artist. First of all, he sees the evil in institutions all around him. In medical school, which was seven years in France at the time and perhaps still is, Celine did his graduate paper on Emille Semmelweiss. Semmelweiss basically discovered that puerperal fever was being spread by doctors doing pelvic exams on pregnant women and not washing their hands between examining patients. He had the slides, he had the proof, the whole deal--and the medial profession ended up putting him in an insance asylum because anybody who insisted that doctors could POSSIBLY be "dirty" or the cause of spreading disease. IMO, Celine himself is the inescapable example that man is a combination of good and evil.

We all think we have good values and would never do anything evil, but how many of us have either been pressed to our limits in situations or have really looked hard at the truth of ourselves? When I was growing up, it was just accepted that it was "evil" for blacks and whites to marry, and especially "evil" if they had children. How could people do that to innocent children! But up through the '50s and much of the 1960s, those were standard middle class values. Had I been born 20 years earlier, who knows? I might have written pamphlets on the evils of miscegenation. The point is, even without such social constructs, we're capable of a lot of things that would scare our very own selves to death. The thing I love about Celine's best writing is that he often inverts good into evil and vice versa. At least as I read a novel like JOURNEY, I'm love the chaos and inversions Celine uses, ie, one minute he's railing at everybody, "Jews! Catholics! Free Masons! Kill them all!"; the next minute he's railing at himself, "The truth is I've never been right in the head"; and the next minute he's writing a tender section about a man who sends money to an orphan with no possible gain for himself and says as he watches the man sleep, "There ought to be some mark by which to distinguish good people from bad."

For me, Celine's antisemitism--which he did pay for by being exiled to a cold rock of an island for decades--is one of his negative human traits that was and unfortunately has been the prevailing cultural view of Jews since the rise of Christianity. The fact that most people were antisemitic at the time does not excuse Celine, but it does put it in context. However, even if he had been a sado-masochistic, cannabilistic, child-molesting serial killer, if he could write novels like JOURNEY TO THE END OF THE NIGHT and DEATH ON THE INSTALLMENT PLAN, I would still have to acknowledge his brilliance as a writer and I don't just mean making pretty sentences. I mean in terms of telling the truth about the human condition in a way that satisfies all those feelings we need to say something is great art. In other words, hate the artist, love the art. But that's just me. That's also why I love PSYCHOPATHIA SEXUALIS. Kraft-Ebbing interviewed hundreds of "perverts, the "lowest of the low" and in simple but elegant language described what they did without ever losing the feeling that these people are our equals. He never looked down on these people and that elevates what is essentially a medical textbook into near literary prose, IMO.

You said in your post, "[Literature] is more like music or performance art in that in order to fully appreciate it (especially when we are talking about such psychological works as the Journey) you have to really become involved in it. In a way, you have to become an inhabitant of the work the author has created. In that sense it often becomes scary to be in the world created by someone whose philosphy you dispise." I'm curious about two things: (a) Did you know about Celine's antisemitic pamphlets before or after you first read JOURNEY? and (b) Do you feel that reading JOURNEY affected you for the better, the worse, or not at all?

I'd appreciate hearing your views. Celine is definitely a sticky wicket as a writer, just as LOLITA is an extremely difficult novel for many people to see as literature. Also, I don't run into many people these days who even know who Celine is, much less have read him, so I'm interested in hearing what you have to say.
Thanks,
Rgirl

Roaring Mice..........and any other "A Wrinkle In Time" fans, they're making a made for television movie based on the book......42