I was a little shaken...in fact, I'd had a rotten shock!...that's right, a shock...the whole of Europe on my ass...yes, the whole of Europe...plus my friends...my family...all competing to see who could grab more away from me...not leaving me time to say booo...my eyes!...my nose!...my fountain pen...the ferocity of Europe!...the Nazis were no lovebirds, but don't tell me about the sweet gentleness of Europe...

Castle to Castle is even less plot-driven than Death on the Installment Plan and feels even more like the rambling complaints of a bitter old man interspersed with his stories of his trials and sufferings during and just after the end of the Second World War.  The structure and form are conversational, the text appearing much like Céline's side of a conversation or interview taking place in the second half of the 1950s--one topic of conversation is this very book, which is in the process of being written.   

Céline and his wife, the dancer Lili, live in a rural area near Paris where the author has started up a medical practice; as chronicled in Death on the Installment Plan, as a child at the turn of the century, little Ferdinand and his parents would hawk lace and make deliveries of antiques in this very neighborhood.  Céline complains bitterly about his poverty.  When it looked like the Allies were going to overthrow the German occupation and the Vichy government in 1944, Céline, famed as a racist and anti-Semite and closely associated with Vichy regime, fled the country and in his absence his belongings, including many manuscripts, were stolen by criminals or seized by the government.  His books don't sell, and Céline accuses his publishers of hiding his books in cellars and hoarding his stolen manuscripts, waiting for him to die so they can make a killing when his writings rise in value upon his demise.  He declares he will foil them by outliving them, and has extended fantasies about the deaths of both his "friends" and his enemies, vividly--and repetitively--imagining them on Charon's boat, where Charon beats them with an oar so brutally that their eyes hang out of their sockets.

As for his medical practice, Céline also has few patients, maybe because of his reputation as a collaborator, maybe because he is barely presentable.  Céline writes quite a bit about social status and status markers in the first quarter or so of Castle to Castle, and suggests people have no interest in his medical services because, for example, he wears old clothes and is seen to carry his own trash to the curb.  In particular, he talks about how automobiles are a sign of status, and how one reason nobody respects him is that he can't afford one, and has to walk everywhere--people expect a doctor to have a car, and the fact that he lacks one marks him as a loser.  

(Celine loves boats and ships, and becomes entranced by watching harbor activities, but he hates automobiles, and delivers a long angry rant about them.)

The picture of post-war France, and Europe broadly, painted by Céline early in the novel is one of a place wracked by crime and threatened by violence; there are many references to the tumultuous current events of 1950s France and larger Europe: the development of the H-bomb, the Suez crisis, the Poujadists, the Hungarian Revolution, the fellaghas--there is no explanation or context for these references, Céline presumably assuming readers know all about them, as presumably readers would have when the book was published in 1957; we current readers luckily have google and wikipedia to get us up to speed on any of these capers and controversies with which we might not already be familiar.  Céline, reviled in public and accused (apparently unjustly) of selling military secrets to the Germans, fears for his life and for the security of his wife. In the interest of defense, he and his wife own a pack of vicious dogs which irritates the neighbors and presents a threat to Céline's few patients. (Céline, fulfilling one of those stereotypes of misanthropes, loves animals, and in this 1950s period has a whole menagerie, including a hedgehog.)  

Around the 90-page mark (the edition of Castle to Castle at the internet archive is like 360 pages, but, unlike the densely massive wall-of-text of Death on the Installment Plan, there are separate, though unnumbered, chapters here in Castle to Castle and the blank space in between them cuts down the word count a little) we get our first of several surreal sequences, probably the most surreal.  Céline is on a house call at night--you know, so his enemies can't see him--and has a hallucination, perhaps connected to a relapse of the malaria that he has carried with him since his days in Africa in 1917.  Always fascinated by the river and watercraft, he spots one of the excursion boats on the Seine that caters to tourists--bizarrely it is on the move at night, and he can see it despite the dark; the reason: the tour boat has been commandeered by Charon and is ferrying the dead!  From it disembark some deceased friends of Céline's, fellow collaborators including Emile, a guy who fought with the Legion of French Volunteers Against Bolshevism and was lynched by a vengeful mob after his return home to France, and the actor Robert Le Vigan, who like Céline spent some time in prison thanks to his collaborationist activities and after his release went to Latin America.   

After this we get some anecdotes about Céline's interment in a Danish prison after the war, where he worked in the cancer ward, having been assigned the job of alerting the staff when a patient died and helping them cart the corpse away. 

Before he was in Denmark, while the war was in its closing stages, Céline spent time in Germany, in the town of Sigmaringen, to which the Vichy government and other collaborators had fled. The over one thousand pro-Axis French people there (one of Céline's little jokes, one that he uses again and again, is that he knows exactly how many collaborators were at Sigmaringen, 1,142) were provided by the Germans quarters in and around an old castle which Céline describes as labyrinthine and decrepit and full of old paintings and furniture.  The collaborators do not live in comfort: they are menaced by the ever present possibility of an Allied air raid, terrified by the approaching Free French Army--in particular the famously brutal Senegalese troops--and are not impressed by German hospitality; Céline talks at length about the quantity and quality of the food provided the French refugees.  What I am thinking of as the main part of Castle to Castle is the series of absurd and surreal anecdotes and character sketches set in Sigmaringen that takes up like two-thirds of the book.  As I guess I have already complained, this novel is weak on plot, and these anecdotes don't build up to anything--there is no climax or resolution, these episodes are basically self-contained, and the book just ends all of a sudden.

One of my favorite anecdotes is about how, even though every third or fourth page Céline is telling us that the sky is full of British and American bombers and the Luftwaffe has no means whatsoever to interfere with them, and that everybody in Sigmaringen is quaking in his or her boots because the merciless black soldiers of the Free French Army are going to strike at any moment, some pro-German Frenchies in the castle or its environs are still confident of an Axis victory.  One batch of people sits around plotting the future government of France, who will get what post, who will be executed, even what sort of statues will be erected in Paris after the war is over and the Western Allies and the Soviets have been vanquished.  One guy has developed a modern and efficient means of executing people, and spends his time training a squad of executioners in his technique because he wants to be ready to get to work at once exterminating all the Frenchmen who tried to sell France out to the English, the Americans and the Commies upon the reconquest of France by the Wehrmacht--he has calculated that it will take three months to liquidate everybody on the list of 150,000 traitors. 

One of the first surreal scenes in Sigmaringen has the leader of Vichy France, Phillipe Petain, responding to an R.A.F. attack with total sangfroid, saving the collaborators from death from British bombs and machine gun fire so they can risk the death penalty in front of a French court after the war.  In a somewhat similar scene, another prominent figure of the Vichy government, Pierre Laval, prevents a riot in a train station where an international cast of soldiers, female locals and Frenchwomen forced to work in Germany are having a sort of orgy.  I have no idea to what extent Céline, by portraying the most famous people convicted of betraying France as heroic lifesavers, as the dei ex machina of absurdist scenes of terrible danger, is sincerely expressing admiration for Petain and Laval, reminding people that Petain and Laval were widely admired before World War II, or just trying to offend his own critics and public opinion at large.

Another surreal scene in Sigmaringen centers not on physical violence and danger but on scatology.  Céline, his wife and their pet cat are housed in a hotel, in a room across the hall from the toilet.  Céline, who is long-winded and repetitive, describes at great length how everybody in the entire town comes to use this toilet, so that there is a long line of people in the hall at all hours, right in front of Céline's door; many people can't hold it long enough (we are told German food has a laxative effect) so the floor is covered in human waste that seeps under Céline's door so he and his wife and any visitors have to wade through it:

...the hallway was a geyser!...and our room!...a waterfall down the stairs!...the devil take the hindmost!...catch-as-catch-can in shit!

(We can see, as in Death on the Installment Plan, Céline's characteristically pervasive ellipses and extensive employment of cliched phrases like "devil take the hindmost" and "catch-as-catch-can.") 

In Castle to Castle we see more of the racism for which Céline is famous than we did in Death on the Installment Plan; allied to this is a belief in biological determinism and physiognomy or morphopsychology.  Céline, in an anecdote about a police commissioner caught trying to cross the border, he having been betrayed by a smuggler or "runner" he had hired to guide him, asserts that you can tell just by looking at some people that they are untrustworthy:

...falling into a trap like that...even an ingenious trap! oh, oh, he [the doomed police commissioner] must know a thing or two about those things! it's his job! he had only to look at the mugs on those "border runners"!  Those faces...the treachery, the villainy, the degeneracy, the stigmata!...regular carnival masks!...nature goes to the trouble of putting masks like that on people! and it doesn't wise you up...that's your hard luck!

Céline features some characters who are of mixed parentage, the children of one parent from Western Europe and one from Eastern Europe or the Middle East, and warns us that such "hybrids" who can move within multiple cultures are dangerous ("cross-breeding is full of peril.")  He uses the dreaded word that we are all afraid to say--the word we are all afraid to type!--the career-ending "n-word," to refer to the Senegalese, as well as "coon"--did French people in the 1940s and 1950s really use this term for black people?  (Reading this book and Death on the Installment Plan, I sometimes wondered if Manheim might be introducing inappropriate Americanisms or Anglicisms into the translation.)      

As with Death on the Installment Plan, I like Castle to Castle more now that I have finished it than I did while I was reading it.  This is especially the case with this one because Céline finishes the novel with two particularly interesting episodes, one in which he rides a dilapidated train to Berlin and back as a member of a French delegation to the funeral of a Vichy official who died under mysterious circumstances while in German custody--this episode has some of the most engaging images in the novel--and the other a surprisingly emotionally affecting anecdote about one of Celine's 1950s patients.

So, the book is long and repetitive and can be hard to follow unless you are constantly looking up stuff in the footnotes and on wikipedia, but there are good parts in there--funny jokes, memorable images, World War II trivia, surprising turns of phrase.  Céline wrote two more novels about his adventures after fleeing France, North and Rigadoon, and I will probably get around to reading those as well.

I began to realize that my mother would always regard me as an unfeeling child, a selfish monster, a little brute, capricious, scatterbrained…They had tried everything, done everything they could…it was really no use.  There’d never be any help for my disastrous, innate, incorrigible propensities…She could only face the facts, my father had been perfectly right…

I started Death on the Installment Plan while on a road trip to the Middle West where reside many of my in-laws, and finished it back at HQ; it took me kind of a long time to finish it partly because I was busy and distracted and partly because after 300 pages or so I got a little tired of it--the plot of the novel doesn't really pull you along, it is a series of anecdotes, all of which have sort of the same tone and achieve the same effects and make the same points, and it sort of got a little stale.

Death on the Installment Plan is a sort of fictionalized memoir written in a breathless style, consisting of short, pithy sentences separated by thousands of ellipses.  Exactly why there are ellipses in every paragraph, and how much this reflects the original French, I do not know.  The text includes many cliches and colloquialisms as well as lots of slang, adding to the feeling given by the short direct sentences and all those ellipses that the book is the transcription of the rambling monologue of some old and bitter man instead of an actual written literary artifact that has been carefully polished.  A good example of Céline's (or the translator's) use of stock phrases and cliched metaphors comes on page 464 when a woman delivers a speech full of ellipses denouncing her husband; her philippic incorporates, in the space of less than half a page, "He's coming apart at the seams," "He doesn't know where the next nickel is coming from," "I know the score," "He won't get away with it," "He'd better watch his step," and "I won't stand for it."  For long stretches I found Céline's style engaging and appreciated its economy and the way it sounded like real ordinary people (who are excited or angry) talking, but a steady diet of it began to wear on me.

The first 40 or so pages depict the novel’s present, in which an adult Ferdinand is a doctor working at a clinic in Paris, constantly in some kind of trouble with his colleagues and superiors; he does his writing on the side.  This portion of the book I found sort of vague and confusing, and much of it consists of a surrealistic dream sequence and tiresome digressions in which Ferdinand tells other characters fantasy stories about a King Krogold.  But then we flashback to the turn of the century, to Ferdinand's childhood, and this section I found vivid and compelling.  

The young Ferdinand lives on a dirty and smelly Parisian street, a covered passage, a sort of shopping arcade with apartments over the shops that is covered by a glass roof that keeps off the rain but also keeps in smells and heat.  Ferdinand is the only child of a man who works at an insurance company by day and on his off hours makes deliveries for the shop run by his wife, who sells antiques and lace articles.  Death on the Installment Plan is a long series of anecdotes and vignettes, all of which are disgusting and depressing, depicting life as a war of all against all and expressing the narrator's misanthropy and self-loathing.  Almost all the characters, the narrator not least of all, are pathetic (e.g., mom has a bad leg and limps constantly) and/or callous or even cruel (there are a multitude of scenes of domestic violence and sexual exploitation), and the incidents described generally conclude with people sobbing, vomiting, or being injured in some way.  The climax of the novel is a suicide and a long description of the challenging effort to deal with the shattered body.  Everyone is desperate, living on the edge of physical and/or financial destruction, taking desperate risks to make a little money and then seeing their enterprises come to disaster.  Father is always in fear of getting fired, the shop never sells enough to make a real profit, and little Ferdinand is so frazzled and put upon that he doesn’t have time to wipe his ass properly and so never stops smelling of shit.

I had a depraved nature…It was inexplicable…There wasn’t a speck or straw of honor in me…I was rotten through and through…repulsive, degenerate!  I was unfeeling, I had no future…I was as dry as a salt herring…I was a hard-hearted debauchee…a dungheap…full of sullen rancor…I was life’s disillusionment…I was grief itself.

The episodic novel's central plot, such as it is, consists of Ferdinand’s parents and uncle trying to find a place in the world for the smelly boy, get him a job in another shop or apprentice him to some artisan or something.  Bad luck, the ruthlessness and cruelty of others, and the narrator’s own questionable character conspire to render their early efforts a fiasco.  Along the way, little Ferdinand has grotesque sexual experiences with adult women and ugly girls closer to his own age, as well as homoerotic experiences with boys his age.    

At the same time that all this is pretty disgusting, it is often also pretty funny.  Céline describes everyone’s problems and their reactions to defeat—their rage and agony--in a hyperbolic fashion which is quite amusing.  Maybe I am cold-hearted, but the over-the-top nature of many passages transforms the tragedies they retail into extravagant farcical hilarity.

I had the best position in the football game, I kept goal…that gave me a chance to meditate…I didn’t like to be disturbed, I let almost everything through…When the whistle blew, the brats flung themselves into the battle, they plowed through the muck till their ankles cracked, they charged at the ball, full steam into the clay, they plastered themselves with it, their eyes were full of it, their whole heads were covered…When the game was over, our little angels were nothing but molded garbage, staggering hunks of clay…with big wads of pigeon shit sticking to them.  The muddier they were, the shittier, the more hermetically sealed, the happier they felt…They were wild with joy under their crusts of ice, welded into their clay helmets.  

Around page 200, Ferdinand having blown all his job opportunities in Paris, is sent to a school for boys in England, his relatives thinking that knowledge of English will be a skill that can open up to him new job opportunities in the City of Lights.  For me, Ferdinand’s time at the English school is a highlight of the novel, as Céline satirizes the English weather and the English mania for sport and presents some crazy English characters: the ugly schoolmaster and his beautiful wife; a horny student who can’t get enough of Ferdinand’s cock and semen (this kid enjoys pretending to be a dog!); and a retarded student who has to be watched like a hawk lest he eat inanimate objects or walk off a cliff or into traffic due to his horrible eyesight (at night they keep this moron in a cage!)  Ferdinand is bigger and older than his English classmates and physically dominates them; he also steadfastly refuses to cooperate with the schoolmaster—Ferdinand acts like a mute, declining to speak for weeks, even months, at a stretch.  He stops going to class and instead spends all his time with the schoolmaster’s wife, helping her chaperone the imbecile (sometimes Ferdinand jerks him, you know, to calm him down) and run errands in the town, where Ferdinand takes the opportunity to shoplift from all the stores.  Our hero is crazy with lust for the schoolmaster’s wife, but when she hints at the possibility of indulging his desires, Ferdinand, a thorough-going misogynist, doesn’t take advantage of her openness—women, he is sure, are all vampiric backstabbing liars, and instead he dreams about her while that horny canine of a student jerks him and sucks him off.

It wasn’t easy to resist…The harder it was for me, the stronger I became…She wasn’t going to soften me, the bloodsucker, even if she were a hundred times as pretty.

After the English episode, halfway through the novel, Ferdinand returns to Paris, where he severs relations with his parents after a ferocious hand-to-hand fight with his father.  An uncle takes him in and gets him a sort of internship with one of the smartest men in France, a science writer who not only edits a magazine that caters to inventors and writes books that explain scientific and engineering concepts to lay people, but flies his own hydrogen and methane balloon and drives experimental race cars.  Death on the Installment Plan is full of hyperbole and this character, who has written hundreds of books and throws around all kinds of scientific terminology, is like a comic figure from an early science fiction story, a genius in every field of science and engineering when it comes to theory but a physical klutz who can't drive a single nail without harming himself.  The second half of Céline's novel is all about Ferdinand's relti0nship with this guy, and over its 275 pages we learn how vice-ridden, mercenary and corrupt this genius really is, eventually meet his masculine, pipe-smoking, domineering wife and then witness all his publishing, scientific and financial projects come to absolute disaster.  It is his suicide and its gruesome and lachrymose aftermath that brings the novel to a close. 

For me, Death on the Installment Plan is too long and unvaried in tone and theme.  After four hundred pages or so the novelty of its fever pitch, of the characters' long shrieking tirades full of self pity and outrage, wears thin.  I probably would have enjoyed it more if it had come to me as two or three separate books--one on life among the shops of the covered passage, one on the school in England, one on life with the science writer--and I had taken a break of months or years between each book.        

I have to provide a trigger warning for my readers who were born in the 21st century or who were born in the 20th century but have embraced the current values of all right-thinking people who don’t want to lose their social media accounts.  Céline uses the dreaded “n-word” and calls Chinese people “Chinks” and says crummy things about women, and he doesn’t explicitly condemn men’s striking of women.  Céline is famous for being a Jew-hater and a sympathizer with fascism and Naziism, but that sort of thing is essentially under the surface here.   

Lefties (as well as anti-capitalism right-wingers) might appreciate Death on the Installment Plan as a stark portrait of life in the market economy, a dramatization of the ceaseless pressure in a market society to please customers and employers, to adapt to changing market conditions.  Ferdinand’s parents’ small shop suffers from competition with large stores and their fortunes are tied to unpredictable changes in taste—they are in real trouble when lace goes out of style or when the hats they purchased in bulk similarly lose popularity and become unsalable.  Céline satirizes the ideas of progress of the middle-class people of the industrial democracies, portraying changes in technology as a challenge or a trap rather than a boon or benefit—the narrator’s father struggles, with limited success, to learn how to use a typewriter, and the science writer's balloon is dangerous and out of control and his racecars even more so--one of them mysteriously explodes, blowing a female admirer to bits.  The second half of the book portrays inventors as well as investors in new technology as grasping maniacs who destroy themselves and everybody around them.  A disgruntled mob of inventors, readers of the magazine the science writer and Ferdinand publish, destroys the office of the magazine, forcing our heroes to move to the country, where they experiment, disastrously, with using radiation to increase crop yields.  And as the novel's title (Mort a credit en francais) suggests, buying things on credit and going into debt and being pursued by those to whom one owes money are recurring themes of the book.  If you hate Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and your credit card company, maybe this book is for you. 

I've told you it is too long and kind of wears out its welcome with its monotony, but I will still recommend Death on the Installment Plan to people who enjoy down-and-out narratives in the voices of creative types who act like jerks and describe their struggles to find and keep ordinary jobs, complain about their poverty and detail their sexual experiences, like those of Henry Miller and Charles Bukowski.  Much of it is pretty funny and it provides a window on life and attitudes of the past.  And Céline is supposed to be important (the article at this link ranks him alongside Proust and Joyce) and he was in the news last year, sixty years after his death, so you can tell yourself reading this thing is educational.