Books: Stinking Boyhood

DEATH ON THE INSTALLMENT PLAN—Louis-Ferdinand Celine — Little, Brown ($2-75).

"In the course of my life," Celine once confessed, "I spent so many years as a bard, a hero, an official, and a doormat in the service of so many thousands of madmen that my memories alone would fill a whole insane asylum." Readers of Journey to the End of the Night, which at 40 turned Celine (real name: Louis Des-touches) from an obscure municipal doctor to the most sensational of contemporary writers, may have thought that savage autobiographical novel was enough to...

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