Castle to Castle (French Literature)

Rating:
Summary: Rants but not deserving of raves
Review: After reading Journey and Patrick McCarthy's biography of Celine, I was prepared for his later work, and eager to find out about Siegmaringen through Celine's inimitable style. For style, unlike Journey, the whole book's elliptical, which does make for a fast perusal! It's a strange pace at which to read the account, for your eyes scan it much more rapidly than the usual sentence/block/paragraph/indented dialogue/he said-she said-quote format.

For this innovation, Celine's postwar prose merits attention. But, at 63, the author had declined, as he acknowledges to us, "you aren't interested in this kind of s*&t anyway"...before launching back into his ramblings. The titular castle's not arrived at until pg. 124, and the previous tirades against his publishers and public dispirit you before this main "plot" begins. Even the orgies with pregnant women and slavering soldiers remain diffused. Little of the detail of earlier works is offered here, other than a brief survey of the labyrinthine Hohollenzern chateau/castle--despite the English title, this is the only edifice of Celine's story. As with his other prose, characters rise and fade quickly and without fanfare. Clotilde and Parmalac and the chained returnee, Aisha and her mastiffs, Restif and his cryptic plans all arouse attention, but all of them vanish too suddenly.

If you like Celine, you need to read this, but this'll test your earlier enthusiasm. He will not earn your pity when he justifies his suffering as greater than that of the Hungarians uprising as he wrote this in 1956. A memoir (translated by Francis Stuart--see his own Black List Section H for an intriguing counterpart of "creative non-fiction" to Celine) on the Charlemagne regiment of French that fought against the Bolshies for the Nazis near the end of the war, Ashes of Honour (British translation's title) or The Captive Dreamer (US title) by Christian de la Maziere is recommended for its more coherent account of the drama within which, in Celine's static locale, collaborators found themselves as the Reich began its collapse.

It's noteworthy that I was more moved, as was Celine as narrator here perhaps, by his description of his dog and cat than by any of the humans referred to in their plight. You come away with little sense of the 1,172 refugees in this castle but lots of details of the effects of kohlrabi soup and sour beer on the digestive and sewer systems. In the end, Celine had to write and was driven to tell whatever his impulse made him speak, but the results after the war attest to his decline and increasingly deep rut, which are unsurprising but still aesthetically dulling.

Rating:
Summary: Destruction in Grand Eloquence
Review: 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...

Rating:
Summary: Louis-Ferdinand Celine
Review: 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!

Rating:
Summary: Hitler's Last Dance...
Review: 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...

Rating:
Summary: Hitler's Last Dance...
Review: 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...