[B]eing on the wrong side of history also served him a heaping plate of material for new work after 1945 when, in a trilogy of novels-D'un château l'autre (Castle to Castle, 1957), Nord (North, 1960), Rigodon (1961)-he chronicled a shattered world in ever more fragmented prose and honed his persecution complex via his increasingly deranged narrator. The writer who said he was only about style was in fact a revisionist historian, providing a rare and perversely instructive view of Vichy from the point of view of the defeated. His postwar novels are much more overtly political than the first two. They're also ventures into Holocaust denial: "Nuremberg," he wrote in D'un château l'autre, "needs redoing." (Louis-Ferdinand Céline)

[B]eing on the wrong side of history also served him a heaping plate of material for new work after 1945 when, in a trilogy of novels-D'un château l'autre (Castle to Castle, 1957), Nord (North, 1960), Rigodon (1961)-he chronicled a shattered world in ever more fragmented prose and honed his persecution complex via his increasingly deranged narrator. The writer who said he was only about style was in fact a revisionist historian, providing a rare and perversely instructive view of Vichy from the point of view of the defeated. His postwar novels are much more overtly political than the first two. They're also ventures into Holocaust denial: "Nuremberg," he wrote in D'un château l'autre, "needs redoing."

Louis-Ferdinand Céline

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castle chateau complex defeated denial fact historian history holocaust instructive material narrator needs north persecution plate point political prose providing rare say side style trilogy via view work world writer wrong nuremberg revisionist vichy

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