Rigadoon

Follows Celine's nightmare journey with his wife and cat across war-torn Germany into Denmark

Céline, Louis-Ferdinand

Literature & Fiction

Penguin??Books

Castle to castle

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 protectorsâ€”including CÃƒÂ©line, his wife, their cat, and an actor friendâ€”attempt to postpone the postwar reckoning under the constant threat of air raids and starvation. With an undercurrent of sensual excitement, CÃƒÂ©line paints an almost unbearably vivid picture of human society and the human condition.,br>Called by Atlantic Monthly "the blackest of the black" of CÃƒÂ©line'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.

Castle to Castle

In this novel, Louis-Ferdinand CÃ©line (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.

North

Trapped in a labyrinthine German castle with other French fascists, near the close of World War II, an aging doctor recalls and hallucinates the trials and terrors of his tormented life

Blond

In this novel, Louis-Ferdinand Celine (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.

Manheim, Ralph

Vintage/Ebury (A Division of Random House Group)

North (English and French Edition)

Contemporary

Dell Books

Completed right before his death in 1961, Rigadoon, the most compassionate of Celine's novels, explores the ravages of war and its aftermath.

Literary

DELACORTE PRESS

Published in rapid succession in the middle 1930s, Journey to the End of the Night and Death on the Installment Plan shocked European literature and world consciousness. Nominally fiction but more rightly called "creative confessions," they told of the author's childhood in excoriating Paris slums, of service in the mud wastes of World War I and African jungles. Mixing unmitigated despair with Gargantuan comedy, they also created a new style, in which invective and obscenity were laced with phrases of unforgettable poetry. Céline's influence revolutionized the contemporary approach to fiction. Under a cloud for a period, his work is now acknowledged as the forerunner of today's "black comedy." Death on the Installment Plan is the story of young Ferdinand's first 18 years. His life is one of hatred, of the grinding struggle of small shopkeepers to survive, of childhood sensations and fantasies - lusty, scatological, violent, but also poetic. There is a running battle with his ineffectual insurance clerk of a father, with his mother, who lives and whines around the junkshop she runs for the boys benefit; there is also the superbly funny Meanwell College in England where the boy went briefly, a Dickensian, nightmare institution. Always there is humiliation, failure, and boredom, at least until he teams up with the "scientist" des Pereires. This inventor, con-man, incorrigible optimist - whose last project is to grow enormous potatoes by electricity - rescues him, if only temporarily; for the reader he is one of the most lovable charlatans in literature.

Death on the Installment Plan

Signet

Death on the instalment plan (Panther modern fiction)

Panther

Journey to the End of the Night

John Calder Pub Ltd

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Céline, Louis-Ferdinand. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Céline, Louis-Ferdinand

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Céline, Louis-Ferdinand. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Rigadoon

Castle to Castle

North

Castle to castle

North

North (English and French Edition)

Rigadoon

Death on the Installment Plan

Death on the instalment plan (Panther modern fiction)

Journey to the End of the Night