Als een bom in twee literaire vijvers: Célines Voyage au bout de la nuit in Frankrijk en in Nederland, 1932-1934

The publication of Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s debut novel Voyage au bout de la nuit in October 1932 caused a shock, both in France and abroad. Journalists and critics were confronted with a book that broke with literary and linguistic conventions, and provoked the bourgeois order through a fundamental and uneasy nihilism. This article explores the reception of Céline’s first novel in the French and Dutch press between October 1932 and the end of 1934 on the basis of four themes that dominated the reception: the literary genre to which the book was assigned; the vision of life and the social criticism expressed in the novel; the style; and the worldview of the book and its author. Additionally, the reception in both countries is literary-historically contextualized. What characterized the climate in which this novel appeared? Which aspects of the two literary fields can be made visible through research on the reception of this controversial novel?