Castle to Castle is an autobiographical novel focusing on Louis-Ferdinand Céline's years in exile from Sigmaringen in Germany to Denmark, and finally to Meudon (France). This autobiography recounts fictional and real events entwined with Céline's absurd writing style.

I started this novel, I was afraid of what I would find for I had the certitude that this 'autobiography' would be nothing more but the tale of a collaborationist taking pleasure in self-pity. And I was proven right.

Throughout the novel, Céline categorically refuses to take responsibility for his role as a collaborationist under the Vichy government during WWII (even before WWII began, Céline wrote two anti-Semitic pamphlets in the early 1930s and was a supporter of Nazism) preferring spitting his venom toward far more talented authors than himself, whom, contrary to Céline , were part of the resistant fighters from the very beginning of the war (Louis Aragon, Albert Camus, for example).

Céline spends page after page whining and whinging as well as blaming it on everybody else and everything else but himself. He doesn't reflect on his past actions, even worse, he dares to give himself the status of victim comparing himself to Alfred Dreyfus (The Dreyfus case, as it is named, is a late 19th century political plot that saw Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish French officer wrongfully accused of treason), which, in my opinion, is both hypocritical and abject on Céline's part, especially when we know that Céline was anti-Semitic, and that, during WWII, he denounced six Jewish people and one communist.

To conclude, Castle to Castle is a pathetic novel written by a man who was just as pathetic.

Céline, Louis-Ferdinand. D'un château l'autre, Paris, Folio-Gallimard, 1957.