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 protectors—including Céline, his wife, their cat, and an actor friend—attempt 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.

From Library Journal

Published in English seven years after his death (LJ 11/15/68), 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. This translation won a National Book Award.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review

"Castle to Castle [is] a literary event of the first order." -- Newsweek

"Castle to Castle proves how appallingly up to date its dead appalling author is. . . . Cline's style consists of outcries and exclamations, groans and curses, all in white heat, separated by dots which like machine-gun bullets mow down even the mitigating orderliness of grammar." -- Nation

"Celine's mastery in creating one of the truly cathartic experiences of contemporary literature is indisputable." -- Saturday Review

"Cline walks into great literature as other men walk into their own homes." -- Atlantic Monthly

"Cline's experiences have not mellowed him. Here, as in all his novels, . . . he hates everybody, regardless of race, creed or color. If anyone is singled out, it is his publishers, whose limousines, he says, grow even longer, while their authors, in rags, cling behind like pitiful hitchhikers. . . . the translation is a masterpiece." -- New York Times Book Review