Then I saw Grandma lying on her bed, in the inner room, through the half-open door... She was breathing heavily, gasping, choking; her breath was whistling and cutting off... The doctor had just left. After he had firmly grasped the hands of everyone... Then they brought me into the room... I saw her on the bed, struggling to breathe. Her face, yellow and red, drenched in sweat, like a mask that would melt at any moment... Grandma pierced me with her gaze, but even that gaze was filled with love... They pushed me to kiss her... And I leaned over her. But with her hand, she signaled no... She smiled weakly at me... She tried to say something to me... But her voice got stuck in her throat, it wouldn't come out... Nevertheless, in the end, she succeeded... and as sweetly as she could, she whispered: "Work hard, my little Ferdinand!" I was not afraid of Grandma. Deep down, we understood each other... Ultimately, the sure thing is that I worked hard... But that concerns no one else...
Before the Journey to the Edge of Night, before the journey to the end of the world that was the Great War and the Great Massacre, soldier Ferdinand Bardamu is just Ferdinand: a child growing at the edge of life, on the brink of the abyss. A child fed by absolute fear, unbridled despair, and hypocrisy. A child growing up to the rhythms of black comedy, a bankrupt society, impending destruction. He learns to tell the story of his life in a shocking way: with voices, with murmurs, with curses and silences, with bitter, tragic, verbose ellipses... But above all with laughter. Because Ferdinand weaves the threads of chaos and hysteria around him with the masterful cross-stitches of Rabelais: he laughs bitterly and spontaneously, he laughs and mocks himself and others. Gods and demons. And of course, people.
Ferdinand turns the pages of this epic Bildungsroman, which is his adolescence, with a momentum and passion that takes your breath away. He moves forward without pitying either his soul or his body; he spends ruthlessly to endure, to stand on his feet, to walk – ultimately to live. His speech overturns everything, logic, grammar, syntax; this is how he moves. He presses the gas burning beauties and beliefs and words. He runs without brakes. At the end of the book, we see him arrive alive, upright, ready for a new beginning.
M. A.
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