Castle to Castle

There's Hamsun, there's Céline, D.H. Lawrence to an extent, and that wraps up the greatest three novelists of the twentieth century. Why? Because they speak the truth, the unrelenting, unmitigated, absolute truth. You can take it or leave it, but is should be said. I like to imagine that some superior intelligence out in the outer space already knows this... Funny thing about Céline's 'war trilogy' is that it's not usually considered en par with his two classics, but it is just as mind-blowing. Of course, the Manheim translation does the justice to the genius of Dr. Destouches! Bravo.

Anatole Broyard wrote a wonderful review of Castle to Castle for "The New York Times", January 5, 1969; it begins: "In 1932, with Journey to the End of the Night, Louis-Ferdinand Céline snatched French literature from the manicured hands of Gide, Proust and Valery and gave it a gusto, a savage bite, it had hardly known since Rabelais and Villon. Four years later, with Death on the Installment Plan he had already snarled and elbowed his way into the pantheon." I had an enormous problem reading Céline's "Journey" when it was assigned in college because his trio of anti-Semitic pamphlets so offended me: Bagatelles pour un massacre (Trifles for a Massacre) (1937), L'École des cadavres (School of Corpses) (1938) and Les Beaux draps (The Fine Mess) (1941). My roommate, a Jewish candidate for a Masters in English, told me I was a sheltered Waspish farm boy, to grow up and expose myself to every important writer I could find and to try to keep an open mind. (He impressed me greatly as a scholar, once spending 48 hours straight reading and re-reading "The Merchant of Venice", before concluding: "This is an anti-Semitic play.") In the event, I followed my instructor's and my roomate's advice, and re-read both "Journey" and "Death", finally concluding that Céline was not only anti-Semitic but also anti-human. It was with trepidation I read "Castle" when "The New York Times" chose it as one of the best of 1969, and although there were moments of unpleasantness, ten years of life experience made the book come alive for me. In a certain sense, I even found a certain sympathy for Céline and his troubles. 40 years later, as I re-read the extracts and reflect on all three of Céline's masterpieces, I believe Céline has expressed a dark but very true part of what makes us human. Read these extracts and see what you think: From the Introduction: A life of poverty . . . worse than poverty, because when you're just poor you can let yourself go, get drunk, lie in the gutter. This was the kind of poverty that keeps up a front, dignified poverty, and that's awful. For instance . . . all my life I've eaten noodles. Noodles, because you see, my mother used to mend old lace. And one thing that everybody knows about old lace is that odors stick to it forever. And the customers, well, you can't bring your customers smelly lace. So what didn't make any odors? Noodles. I ate whole washtubs full of noodles, my mother made them by the washtubful . . . I ate boiled noodles, oh yes, oh yes, my whole childhood, noodles and bread soup. These things were odorless. I've got to admit, some stubborn bastard manages to discover me in the sub-basement of some storehouse under a pyramid of returns . . . oh, I could easily get used to the idea of being the scribbler that nobody reads any more . . . rejected by pure, purified Vrance! . . . oh, I could be perfectly happy about it ... but there's the question of noodles... Brottin is a horse of a different color . . . Achille Brot

Published in English seven years after his death, this is considered one of Celine's darkest novels. It is also autobiographical. Like the author, the novel's central character is a Nazi collaborator who is nonetheless destroyed by them. Mixing black humor and piercing cynicism, Celine recreates his own experiences at a castle in Sigmaringen, Germany, where the Germans installed remnants of the French collaboritionist government after Allied landings in 1944...

Castle is a book that Celine felt he had to write before he died,...in it he describes his flight from France in 1944 and engages the reader with the last vision of the dying Vichy government in exile...Celine is humorous and even shows a hint of redemption for the destructive behavior of man that produced World War 2...

This,the first in the trilogy which depicts the author'sexperiences during the last WW,is a wacky gut-spilling,bile grittingnarrative on Celine's situation as he humorously & matter of factly relates his ordeal centered at a castle with the inhabitants there.His style in doing so:3-dot spiteroons;interjections between story lines that may surprise the unsuspecting reader; & coagulations of the story's narrative with personal thoughts from out of the blue.The crude,free form technique which has spawned numerous bastard writers is brilliantly expressed here once again.His boundless imagination & endless ideas for lashing out at people are intoxicating & admirable the least.In fact,the first 120 pages are all but scathing & brutal,if I should say heinous attacks on his opponents; & so brilliantly amusing that you wouldnt know who to feel sorry for.A man "unjustly" persecuted in his own lifetime,the pathological tales of persecution in this novel border at times on the fantastic to the point that it's quite difficult to tell whether one should believe it or not.The novel is a bit tough on the read;a few of his slang & offhand remarks demand digestible consumptions once in a while.And the childish spurts of humor that jump at times can be cute or funny,but in continous instances can be a wee bit tiring.All said,one of the best works from probably the most realistically revolutionary & most truthfully influential novelist of the 20th Century.The work of a genius.