Louis-Ferdinand Celine – Death On The Instalment Plan – First Edition 1938
£650.00
First edition, first printing of ‘Death on the Instalment Plan’. Published by Chatto and Windus in London, 1938. This is a very good copy. Original black cloth, lettered in white. Original photographic dust wrapper by Schall, repriced at 8/6 net by the publisher. Text block is generally clean and unfoxed. In the rare dust wrapper which has loss at the head of the spine and to the top of the front panel. A good wrapper with a little wear and edge wear and creasing.
The second novel by Louis-Ferdinand Celine, following his explosive debut ‘Journey to the End of the Night’.
The novel is semi-autobiographical, tracing the miserable childhood and adolescence of Ferdinand, Céline’s fictional alter ego, in working-class Paris. It portrays poverty, humiliation, illness, and family dysfunction with brutal honesty and dark comedy. Céline’s style is revolutionary: fragmented sentences, slang, ellipses, and a spoken-voice rhythm that broke sharply from traditional literary French. Though controversial (partly due to Céline’s later political writings), the novel is considered a landmark of 20th-century modernist literature for its raw emotional intensity and stylistic innovation.
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- Description
Description
First edition, first printing of ‘Death on the Instalment Plan’. Published by Chatto and Windus in London, 1938. This is a very good copy. Original black cloth, lettered in white. Original photographic dust wrapper by Schall, repriced at 8/6 net by the publisher. Text block is generally clean and unfoxed. In the rare dust wrapper which has loss at the head of the spine and to the top of the front panel. A good wrapper with a little wear and edge wear and creasing.
The second novel by Louis-Ferdinand Celine, following his explosive debut ‘Journey to the End of the Night’.
The novel is semi-autobiographical, tracing the miserable childhood and adolescence of Ferdinand, Céline’s fictional alter ego, in working-class Paris. It portrays poverty, humiliation, illness, and family dysfunction with brutal honesty and dark comedy. Céline’s style is revolutionary: fragmented sentences, slang, ellipses, and a spoken-voice rhythm that broke sharply from traditional literary French. Though controversial (partly due to Céline’s later political writings), the novel is considered a landmark of 20th-century modernist literature for its raw emotional intensity and stylistic innovation.
