Castle to Castle

Louis-Ferdinand Celine (1894-1961) was a French writer and doctor whose novels are antiheroic visions of human suffering. Accused of collaboration with the Nazis, Celine fled France in 1944 first to Germany and then to Denmark. Condemned by default (1950) in France to one year of imprisonment and declared a national disgrace, Celine returned to France after his pardon in 1951, where he continued to write until his death. His classic books include Journey to the End of the Night, Death on the Installment Plan, London Bridge, North, Rigadoon, Conversations with Professor Y, Castle to Castle, and Normance. Ralph Manheim (b. New York, 1907) was an American translator of German and French literature. His translating career began with a translation of Mein Kempf in which Manheim set out to reproduce Hitler's idiosyncratic, often grammatically aberrant style. In collaboration with John Willett, Manheim translated the works of Bertolt Brecht. The Pen/Ralph Manheim Medal for translation, inaugurated in his name, is a major lifetime achievement award in the field of translation. He himself won its predecessor, the PEN translation prize, in 1964. Manheim died in Cambridge in 1992. He was 85.

"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." —The 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." —The New York Times Book Review "Céline is the genius of naturalism turning upon itself, disgusted with the universe, most of all disgusted with art. He is 'the inspired gravedigger of a decaying world,' a Zola in a nightmare of twentieth century stench, hate, rage, betrayals, hideous swansongs. His novels are autobiographical effusions of fact and hallucination, held together by an ebullient misanthropy, a profound disrespect for conventional ethics, and a totally uncompromising knowledge of fascist Europe in the Thirties and early Forties."—Kirkus Reviews