Louis-Ferdinand Celine · 1932 · global

Celine's 1932 first novel, which changed what French prose could sound like. Ferdinand Bardamu enlists on a whim outside a Paris cafe and spends the rest of the book running - from the Flanders front to a trading post in equatorial Africa, to the Ford assembly line in Detroit, and back to a doctor's practice in a suburb where nobody can pay him.

1. 1
   Paris

   A medical student sitting outside a cafe on the Place Clichy is moved by a passing regiment and enlists on the spot, which he regards ever afterwards as the single stupidest thing anybody has ever done.

2. 2
   Flanders

   The front, and Celine's war is not Remarque's mud but a delirious open-country affair of burning villages and men shooting at each other for reasons nobody can explain - and Bardamu meets Robinson, plotting to defect.

3. 3
   Paris

   Wounded, decorated for a bravery he did not display, and sent back to convalesce - an affair with the American nurse Lola, a breakdown at a fairground shooting gallery, and a spell in the asylums that keep him out of the line.

4. 4
   Marseille

   He signs on for the colonies to get away from all of it, and sails south on the Admiral Bragueton with passengers who very nearly throw him overboard for the offence of being quiet.

5. 5
   Bambola-Bragamance

   A trading post ten days upriver, where he is replacing Robinson - who has already absconded with the funds. Malaria, dysentery, a colonial system that ruins the Africans without enriching anybody, and a hut he burns down.

6. 6
   New York

   Shipped across in a galley in delirium and held at quarantine, he cons his way ashore counting fleas - and finds Manhattan an insipid carnival of vertiginous buildings, and Lola, who gives him a hundred dollars to go away.

7. 7
   Detroit

   The Ford assembly line, better designed, he says, for well-trained chimpanzees than for people - and Molly, who loves him and offers him a settled life, which he takes and then leaves, and regrets for the rest of the book.

8. 8
   Rancy

   He finishes his degree and sets up as a doctor in a poor suburb north-east of Paris - patients who cannot pay, and Robinson turning up again with a plan to murder an old woman for a thousand francs.

9. 9
   Toulouse

   Robinson, blinded by his own booby trap, goes south with the old woman he failed to kill and sells tickets to her mummies in a church crypt - and she falls down the crypt stairs, and nobody says how.

10. 10
    Vigny

    Bardamu ends up running an asylum outside Paris, and Robinson is shot in a taxi by the fiancee he has told he cannot love - and dies, and Bardamu walks out to the canal in the morning with nothing left to be curious about.