Background
Louis Ferdinand Céline was born on May 27, 1894, just outside Paris, where he spent his childhood in humble circumstances.
(It is Germany near the end of World War II, the Allies ha...)
It is Germany near the end of World War II, the Allies have landed and members of the Vichy France government have been sequestered in a labyrinthine castle, replete with secret passages and subterranean hideaways. The group of 1,400 terrified officials, their wives, mistresses, flunkies, and Nazi protectorsâincluding Céline, his wife, their cat, and an actor friendâattempt to postpone the postwar reckoning under the constant threat of air raids and starvation. With an undercurrent of sensual excitement, Céline paints an almost unbearably vivid picture of human society and the human condition. ,br>Called by Atlantic Monthly "the blackest of the black" of Céline's novels and hailed by the Washington Post Book World for its "intense sympathy with individual human beings," Castle to Castle is brilliantly rendered in Ralph Manheim's translation, for which he won the National Book Award.
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( "Theres a book you wont hear a word about on the radi...)
"Theres a book you wont hear a word about on the radio. Theres a book the right-thinking newspapers will not speak about, except to refer to it prim and reproachful terms. Theres a book about which the tabloids of the left will say nothing, except the most inept of them, which only have words of scorn. Theres a book the sale and distribution of which is quite possibly forbidden. Theres a book against which there will be more a conspiracy of silence than of attack. Isnt it a crying shame that, before any reservations, we cannot praise boldness, courage, ardor? There is a rather striking phrase in Célines book, this book that we will be prevented from discussing. He announces his invectives as a kind of revolt of the natives. And I think of those Arab townsalways situated next to a Jewish onewhich, from time to time, in a fit of popular anger, throw themselves in fury on the Jewish quarter and plunder it. We do not want any violence. But when one has a Jewish Prime Minister, when one sees, clearly and simply, France dominated by the Jews, it also should be understood how this violence is prepared, and what explains it. I do not even say what legitimates it, I say what explains it. Have any opinion you want. On the Jews and on Céline. We do not agree with him on all points. But I am telling you: this enormous book, this splendid book, is the first sign of the revolt of the natives. Perhaps this revolt is excessive, more instinctive than reasonable: after all, the natives are us... Robert Brasillach.
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( In Guignols Band, first published in France in 1943, C...)
In Guignols Band, first published in France in 1943, Céline explores the horror of a disordered world. The hero, the semi-autobiographical Ferdinand, moves through the nightmare of Londons underworld during the years of World War I. In this distressing setting, he meets pimps and prostitutes, pawnbrokers and magicians, policemen and arsonists. He sees social and physiological decomposition as these processes unfold along parallel lines of development. The illusions of existence are nakedly exposed. The narrative erupts in Célines characteristic elliptical style. His splintered sentences and scatology reflect his fury at the fragmentation of experience and at his own impotence in the face of it. Out of his rage, he forces the meaninglessness back on itself, and the exuberance of his struggle triumphs in the comic exaggeration of satire. Ultimately, his subject is not death but life, and he responds to it by a strengthened commitment to the sensual and concrete. His hallucinatory world is so vividly realized that it does, indeed, challenge the reality of the readers more conventional world.
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(In this novel, Louis-Ferdinand Céline (Journey to the En...)
In this novel, Louis-Ferdinand Céline (Journey to the End of the Night, Death on the Installment Plan) offers us a vivid chronicle of a desperate man's frantic flight from France in the final months of World War II. Accompanied by his wife, their cat, and an actor friend, our autobiographical narrator Ferdinand leaves Paris for Baden-Baden (a World War II hideaway for wealthy Germans), is then sent to a bombed-out Berlin, and finally leaves for Denmark in search of the gold he had stashed there prior to the war. With the Third Reich in ruins and the Allied armies on Ferdinand's heels, North combines documentary realism with hallucinatory images, capturing the chaos of war and its toll on both victim and victimizer.
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Doctor novelist pamphleteer physician
Louis Ferdinand Céline was born on May 27, 1894, just outside Paris, where he spent his childhood in humble circumstances.
He left school in 1905 but continued to study by himself for the baccalauréat (university entrance) examination while working as apprentice and office boy. In 1912 he enlisted for military service and was badly wounded and decorated during World War I.
Discharged because of his injuries, Céline undertook medical studies and qualified as a doctor in 1924. Extensive travels in Europe, Africa, and North America followed until he set up his practice in a poor district of Paris in 1928. Célinés first novel, Voyage au bout de la nuit (Journey to the End of Night), was published in 1932, when he was 38. It brought him immediate fame. Written in ungrammatical, colloquial language, including slang and obscenities, it has had a great stylistic influence on later writers, both in France and in North America. It describes the adventures, at once implausible yet convincingly portrayed, of the semiautobiographical hero, Bardamu, in the war, in the African jungle, and in America, and finally as an unsuccessful doctor in France. Above all, the novel communicates Céline's disgust and anger at what he considered the stupidity and hypocrisy of society. It is this aspect of Céline's work which came increasingly into evidence in a second novel, Mort à crédit (1936; Death on the Installment Plan), dealing with the experiences of Céline's childhood and adolescence. A growing disillusionment and bitterness at the world around him led him to write works-shrill and hysterical pamphlets more than novels-containing incoherent political diatribes and a good deal of anti-Semitic propaganda. The paranoiac side of his personality was to dominate increasingly in the years which followed. During the German occupation of France in World War II, Céline compromised himself politically by siding with collaborators. After the liberation of France in 1944 he escaped with great difficulty through Germany to Denmark, but there he was imprisoned for over a year on charges of collaboration with the Nazis. In 1951 he was allowed to return to France; he spent the last 10 years of his life in a Paris suburb, still practicing medicine, impoverished and deeply embittered. During this time he wrote several other books based on his experiences during and after World War II. Céline died on July 1, 1961.
(In this novel, Louis-Ferdinand Céline (Journey to the En...)
(It is Germany near the end of World War II, the Allies ha...)
(Completed right before his death in 1961, Rigadoon, the m...)
( In Guignols Band, first published in France in 1943, C...)
( "Theres a book you wont hear a word about on the radi...)
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He viewed life as a frightening nightmare, a world of hallucination and insanity, where hideous ugliness and death were the only true realities.
In 1935, British critic William Empson had written that Céline appeared to be "a man ripe for fascism". Two years later Céline began a series of pamphlets containing antisemitic themes: Bagatelles pour un massacre (Trifles for a Massacre) (1937), L'École des cadavres (The School of Corpses) (1938) and Les Beaux draps (The Fine Mess) (1941). The Fine Mess was last published in France during the German occupation. These works were characterized by a virulent antisemitism, racism and bigotry. His Trifles for a Massacre is an endless litany critical of French Jews and their influence on French society. Both The School of Corpses and The Fine Mess contain antisemitic themes.
While in London he married Suzanne Nebout but they divorced one year later.
In June 1919, Céline went to Bordeaux and completed the second part of his baccalauréat. Through his work with the Institute Céline had come into contact, and good standing, with Monsieur Follet, the director of the medical school in Rennes. On 11 August 1919, Céline married Follet's daughter Édith Follet, whom he had known for some time.