Word: linings
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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CASTLE TO CASTLE by Louis-Ferdinand Céline. 359 pages. De/acorte...
...body," Louis-Ferdinand Céline once wrote, "is always something that's true; that is why it's nearly always sad and repulsive to look at." Céline had ample opportunity to contemplate the human body in full adversity, for he was a doctor and he spent much of his adult life in a run-down Parisian suburb as one of those slum saints who cure what is curable in the poor for little or no pay. Partly as a result, he viewed the body of modern society with unparalleled revulsion and no hope. The only...
Before World War II, Céline spat out the story of his life and times in savage prose poems of hatred and disgust, which instantly made him famous for his genius and notorious for his antiSemitism. He was a vagrant, a prisoner, a hero during the first World War and a traitor during the Second. In 1944 he was jailed for collaborating with the Nazis, and for the next few years was in exile when not in prison. Now, seven years after his death in 1961, Castle to Castle, the final book by this demented genius, appears in English...
Schizoid Mirror. Whatever new and hopeful may have been born in the 20th century, it is generally agreed that much of value has died in our times too. To some, that death began with the first blow of European fratricide, struck in August 1914. For Céline, though, it was the fall of Stalingrad that marked "the end of white man's civilization." In the paroxysm of Hitler's waning power in Europe, he finally found an external circumstance to match the horror of his own inner condition. Accordingly, in bringing to life some of the ghouls...
While Céline's earlier volumes were set against the corruption of pre-war France, Castle to Castle takes place in a special Nazi detention camp. The author's attention is focused, if flashes of sheet lightning can be said to focus, on the "Boche Baroque" fortress-prison of Siegmaringen. The time is late in the war. France has already been liberated by the Allies. At Siegmaringen, French collaborators (including Celine) are huddled together, fearful of R.A.F. bombs, of their German masters and, most of all, of one another. In this bedlam, swarming with bizarre characters...