Louis Ferdinand Celine was one of the greatest novelists of the twentieth century. Louis Ferdinand Celine was a caring doctor and a man with a deep vein of compassion. Louis Ferdinand Celine was an almost insanely vicious racist and anti-semite, calling for the extermination of the Jews in three infamous and untranslated pamphlets and raving about miscegenation and the coming extinction of the white race. These are all facts and trying to explain the contradictions between them deserves a lot more attention than has so far been given.

In the meantime, read Rigadoon. It is not in a class with Journey to the End of Night or Death on the Installment Plan, since its focus is narrower. Celine's racism is more clearly in evidence, and even admirers will find the first thirty pages or so very trying. Celine was not a collaborator, at least not in a legal sense, but on hearing him rave about race suicide or hurling abuse at the resistance, who understandably hated him, one thinks that he should have been grateful he wasn't shot. After that, we get to the novel proper, which is a lightly fictionalized version of the last months of the war. Time, and much else is rather hallucinatory. At one point, Celine says it is May, at another point he is told about Rommel's funeral, which would have been eight months or so earlier. Rigadoon consists of his nightmarish account of Celine's ultimately successful attempt to flee, with his wife and cat, from Germany into Denmark as the war ends. As he is doing so Germany is being systematically pounded into rubble and Celine provides some horrifying passages about painfully slow trains that could be doused at any minute with phosphorous. At one point Celine suffers from a concussion. Along the way Celine and his party meet 17 mentally retarded children, and despite much abuse of these pathetic children, Celine manages to see them safely into Denmark. It is rather revealing though that he never mentions that the Nazis tried to slaughter precisely these children. Through it all we see the trademark Celine style, the famously obscene vernacular, the pages dotted with ellipses, a style which looks so easy, and yet Celine worked so hard on. Obviously, this is a novel which should be better known.

This is one of the best books I have ever read go out and buy it now

O'Connell writes of Celine in a basic way, one without excessive appreciation or disregard...it's a good book to become acquainted with Louis Ferdinand Celine.