It's impossible to read or talk about Louis-Ferdinand Céline (1894-1961) without mentioning his anti-Semitism and his active role in collaboration with the Nazi occupiers during the Second World War in France. While the question of not separating the work from the author is an absolutely legitimate one, it should be noted that Céline's novels are very different from his polemical squibs that he wrote after 1937, and that they bear no marks of his anti-Semitism. Even today, after much controversy, he is considered, along with Marcel Proust, one of the greatest French authors of the 20th century. Firstly, in his style, he influenced generations of writers by transposing orality and spoken French tinged with slang into his writing, a veritable literary revolution, far removed from the academicism of classical language. Then there's his aesthetic: for Philippe Solers, Voyage au bout de la nuit is "the first great novel of the absurd", a dark but powerful novel about the human condition.

Voyage au bout de la nuit was published in 1932 and won the Prix Renaudot the same year. The narrator is a soldier from the trenches of the First World War, who travels through colonized Africa and the United States (notably New York, the "standing city"), then returns to France to become a doctor in the Paris suburbs. A survivor of the war, that "international slaughterhouse in madness", the narrator has lost his innocence and refuses any heroism; cowardice will be the foundation of his existence. Anti-colonial and anti-capitalist, he sees life as a total absurdity in a kind of nihilism tinged with anarchism. But behind this dark and gloomy vision of existence, where everything is nothing but rot and corruption, the narrator finds love and great empathy for the world around him. His vocation as a doctor drives him irrevocably towards others, and seems to affirm that all we have left as human beings is dedication and compassion.