Customer Reviews

Castle to Castle

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4 star:		(2)
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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.

Why aren't you reading Louis Ferdinand Celine? Few authors of the 20th century come close to the brilliance and sheer venom of the man. Nazi collaborator, anti-Semite, CASTLE TO CASTLE finds the author and his wife (and cat) on the run from the "fifis", the triumphant French Army, which is rolling through the countryside, wreaking a terrible vengeance upon any who actively cooperated with or aided the Germans. The stories of atrocities fill those who have sought shelter under the auspices of the defeated German army with terror and dread. Celine is, quite rightly, furious at the hypocrisy of it all--especially since a significant proportion of French intellectuals and artists sat out the war and certainly lied about or exaggerated their work with the Resistance. Surreal at times, always literate, Celine's voice ever-present, CASTLE TO CASTLE is one of the finest works by this tragically under-appreciated master of the printed word.

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 author changed the way I look at literature with _Journey to the End of the Night_, and I was hooked. I've read all the Celine I can get my hands on. _Castle to Castle_ is written in Celine's trademark style, and covers the later days of World War II, when Celine was living under Nazi "protection" with his wife and cat. The fury is still there, as well as some scenarios that prove he hasn't lost his touch by any means, but Celine spends an inordinate amount of time and energy COMPLAINING. Everybody's after him, he's constantly ill-treated, he gets no respect... and now, in his twilight years, he's fed up. He uses this book to launch lengthy, frequent, and tiresome attacks on his publishers. These tirades are funny to a point, but it's also sad to see a great mind devoting so much energy to such unworthy and uninteresting targets. If you like Celine's style, can handle his facist sympathizing, and are willing to endure endless litanies of the literary and critical injustices he's endured in order to read about the more interesting social and physical ones, this book is worth your time, but it does little justice to a master prose stylist and a legitimate social critic.

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 Brottin is your sordid grocer, an implacable idiot ... the only thing he can think about is his dough! more dough! still more! the complete millionaire! More and more flunkeys around him . . . with their tongues hanging out and their pants down...

I'd shut them up once and for all! I was quick to regret it! I still regret it! I seldom let myself go ... but I'd been listening to them too long! . . . "Here," I said. "Take a look at this!" I put my cyanide down on the table in front of them ... on Laval's desk . . . my little phial . . . out of my pocket! ... as long as they're talking about rare metals! . . . I've always got my cyanide on me! . . . ever since Sartrouville . . . here, they can see it ... and the red label . . . they both look..

Google Books offers a very generous selection of pages from this book; these are from "Popular Passages".

2008 Addendum:

For my money, Jack Keroauc has it exactly right as he is quoted in the biography Subterranean Kerouac: The Hidden Life of Jack Kerouac by Ellis Amburn (St. Martin's Press, 1998; p. 301). Kerouac described Celine's work as "a portrait of existence as rotten and mad." If you can bear to see such a portrait whole, read any or all three of Céline's masterpieces.

Robert C. Ross 1970 2008

Note: This is one of twelve NY Times "Editors' Choice" books for 1969; see first Comment.

I read somewhere that Michelangelo considered his artistic oeuvre--all the paintings and sculpture taken together--as one great work, each a sustained whole, and yet fragments of a grander, all-encompassing vision of life. The novels of Celine can be thought of in a similar way--as one large novel, one extended visionary statement, published in a series of volumes.

In *Castle to Castle,* Celine takes up the rant where he last left off, a doctor-refugee and Nazi collaborator on the run with the rest of the Vichy government as Germany implodes during the final lap of WW2. As usual, Celine rails against hypocrisy, betrayal, greed, opportunism, and inhumanity wherever he sees it and he sees it practically everywhere--and an astonishing good deal of it directed, undeservedly, at himself! Poor Ferdinand, everyone hates him, is out to get him, makes him eat worms--well, honestly, when all is said and done, don't we all feel like that, more or less?

A good part of *Castle to Castle,* more than is usually the case, is taken up with Celine's scathingly sarcastic diatribes against personal enemies, some more obscure than others, and even many of the less obscure requiring enough explanatory back-of-the-book editorial notes to become distracting. And, indeed, many of Celine's attacks are repetitious--they often seem to serve as a way to get him warmed up to begin the real subject of any given chapter, an angry theme upon which to build his endlessly vitriolic variations.

You've got to hand it to the French--they aren't afraid to air their dirty laundry, to give the devil his day in court--and to fully appreciate this one has only to realize that Celine really was an incarnation of the devil back in the day. Traitor, Nazi collaborator, racist, anti-Semite, imprisoned, and perilously close to execution, Celine was deservedly, or not, widely reviled and yet publishing books like *Castle to Castle* not all that long after the activities that earned him so much ill-will...books in which he wasn't apologizing or offering explanations for anything, but launching a fierce and unrelenting counterattack! Talk about turning the stick in the wound! Not only was Celine still squawking but he had the nerve to point the finger back at his accusers, calling them, the great heroes of the Resistance, the real traitors and thieves! I can't imagine the parallel occurring in America. Maybe the recent O.J. "fictional" murder confession comes close and not even that was a matter of high treason, of being on the wrong side of the greatest war between good and evil in human history. Well, it just goes to prove what an open-minded people the French are. They'll entertain any viewpoint to any argument so long as it's entertaining enough. And that's one thing you can count on with Celine, even in an "off" effort like *Castle to Castle*--he'll entertain the boots off you.

I'm not exactly sure where *Castle to Castle* falls in the chronology of Celine's exploits, not that it seems to make much difference. Even within his books, chronology is often as topsy-turvy as a city during a bombing. But *Castle to Castle* gives one the impression of a "transitional work"--rather like a car stuck between gears on an uphill grade, it never gets properly going while giving you the impression that it's just about to crest the summit and whatever comes afterwards will be quite a ride. Still, it's a text quite worth reading, especially by Celine fans, who can never quite get enough of the granddaddy of all ranters, this proto-blogger, this anti-literary terrorist.

Celine considered his work--and his unique style--to be the forerunner of the writing of the future (a lot of folks, including the preeminent critic Roland Barthes agreed), and in spite of the immense influence he's already had on a number of major literary figures since--many of those themselves now long dead--it may well be that Celine's real influence is only now being realized in the angry, solipsistic, blackly comic, counter-cultural, fragmented first-person ravings of today's cyber-literary scene. Bristling with indignation, sputtering and spitting with outrage and outrageous insults, barely able to finish a sentence because the next one's rushing out right behind it, Celine's fragments are a kind of mental shrapnel flying in all direction, a mosaic of madness of which we're all heirs, an outrage over the general condition of things so uncontainable it exploded all conventional expression and left it to some unimaginable future to pick up the pieces. Celine, like all forms of terrorism, is a literary question to which we still don't have an answer. *Castle to Castle* is that rare book as important--if not more important--for how it says, as it is for what it says.

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...

Louis-Ferdinand Celine is honestly one of the few writers who really really makes me laugh. You gotta love this French S.O.B.'s outrages. Who else has this audacity? Mama Mia!