This is so much fun. I was thinking about what next book should be thrown into The Territory and I saw all of these amazing books that I haven’t touched in years. I am a voracious re-reader and There are things that I take from a book the fourth time that I didn’t take the first. When art of any kind makes a connection with you it changes with you and your intrepertation of it grows as you grow. As simple as that concept is, it keeps me warm at night. That fads, love and people may come and go but dammit, Dostoevsky is always going to be Dostoevsky. It always bugged me when I’d be talking to someone about books and they would always reply “Oh I read that in college.” as though they read the book for an assignment however many years ago and now it’s just on their resume of cool books they’ve read. Citizens of The Territory, beware of the “Oh, I read that back when” types. Take my advice: Say, “Yeah? Back then? what about now? what mind blowing book are you reading now?” and as their eyes shift awkwardly to their shoes, interrupt them before they have the chance to mutter the “I don’t really have time to rea–” by giving them this book.
Journey To The End Of The Night. JTTEON was written by an angry and quasi insane French man named Louis Ferdinand Celine. He was an avid anti war protestor (waaaaayyy back before it was cool in WW2!) and the book begins with him denouncing the war and through a strange course of events that I won’t go into, finds himself in a military uniform waiting to be shipped off. From that point this guy is thrown into a series of unfortunate events that take him across the world all while pointing damning finger at all that he finds wrong in any society he winds up in. From Paris to Africa to Detroit to on and on and on. It’s like ten Gladiator movies only with a belivable character. The main character is based off of Celine himself and the protagonist is thrown into all of these thuroughly insane situations which just seem to fit naturally with the character. Like Hunter S Thompsons character in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas only more dangerous and more opinionated. There is so much to this book that it it’s impossible to sum up as what the jist of the book is about. To accurately describe this book to somone whithout reading it to them you’d wind up getting into an unending series of “and then… and then… and then…” which reminds me. Celine had a real different way of writing. He didn’t use punctuation they way the rest of us do. All of his books are extremly conversational. Celine would use the elipsis to end a thought because he figured that it was a more accurate description of the way that he spoke. It’s a little odd at first but once you get rolling with the book it becomes second nature and you’ll never think about the elipsis in the same way again. JTTEOTN came out in 1934 and influenced a ton of writers in France at the time from Simone Beauvoir to Henry Miller to Hemingway to Nin to Pound etc. JTTEOTN was Celines first book and it got banned in every language it got translated into. this book and its follow up Death On The Installment Plan are some of the best books to come out of France which is peopled by some real serious writers. Later on Celine went off the deep end and lost it. In his old age he wound up becoming a Nazi sympathizer and it’s such a tragedy to me that someone who reached such heights could get roped into something as weak as racism. Maybe if he was born eighty years later and had been exposed to hip hop he wouldn’t have believed the hype. Either way JTTEOTN is an incredible read that will change you.

“There are two kinds of people. The rich and the poor.” -Celine