The Exile of Celine

Accused Nazi sympathizer Celine--author, doctor, anti-semite--is hunted by the French Resistance, and is arrested and hospitalized to await his seemingly inevitable fate, in this fictional recreation of the controversial writer's last days

Louis-Ferdinand Celine (18941961) is famous in the history of modern literature primarily for two scurrilous, obscenely funny, brilliant black novels of the '30s, Journey to the End of the Night and Death on the Installment Plan. He is infamous as the author of venomous, stridently anti-Semitic, pro-facist pamphlets. This erratic, vivid, episodic biographical novel, by a poet and one-time poetry editor of Paris Review, is centered on the war years, beginning with Celine's flight from France, along with tattered remnants of the Petain regime, in November, 1944, when the end was already in sight. It follows him on his sojourn in Germany and travels to Denmark, where his money was hidden. Celine's personality is grippingly depicted. Sardonic, mocking, contemptuous, wildly vituperative, despising Hitler and the Nazis as ineffectual and loathing the Vichy collaborators, he was equally fearful of the mortal threat to the "civilization of whites" represented by the Communists. Clark has not strayed from the facts of his subject's life. He shows us a man wracked by inner turmoil, dangerously paranoid, a snarl of contradictions. This is not a pleasant read, but it is a distinctive one.
Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Celine, the controversial French novelist and pamphleteer, was accused of collaborating with the Nazis during World War II. While he was openly anti-Semitic and showed little respect for French authorities, that he actively collaborated seems unlikely as he did not think much of Hitler either. Nonetheless, fearing for his life, he fled Paris as the war drew to a close, traveling first to Germany and then to Denmark, where he spent several years in exile. Granted amnesty in 1951, he returned to France and continued writing until his death in 1961. In this intriguing fictional account of his life as an exile, Celine comes across as a tough, irreverent individualist who survived with a certain resolute courage travails that would have crushed lesser men. He may not have been the most likable of characters, but in the end, we are somehow glad he triumphs. Recommended.David W. Henderson, Eckerd Coll. Lib., St. Petersburg, Fla.
Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc.