A masterpiece! My favorite Celine after travel. The content of "On the other castle" is as in his other novels, frenetic assemblage of unstructured sentences, unfinished, full of digressions and expressive than anybody, but much less difficult to read that "Enchantment" "Normance" and perhaps "Guignol's Band". It stands out a lot of these, because of the topics, the time of History addressed (and characters, historical figures) which tend towards the more classical side, more "general public". Why I class alongside travel, because "On the other castle" looks a bit more like a novel, and a novel of great scope! The richness of the language, its incredibly complex flow under its simple appearance, full of detours, returns, shortcuts, the historical culture of Celine, her vision of man and the world, his great sense of hallucination and descriptions, funny and alive , the aphorisms that balance the shovel, his caustic humor, his experience of war and medicine, its side pamphleteer and highly provocative or inappropriate, outspoken spring ... everything in this novel, where only children, animals and the suffering seem to find favor in the eyes of the writer. The other men and women, poor or powerful, including the intelligentsia of his time (Sartre, Mauriac, Aragon and others) are happily dynamite, very badly debunk. And I loved the mention of his dog Betty, which takes four and a half pages, as she was beautiful and brave, and as she also suffered from hunger during the years of exile. These pages are a beauty and a very poignant simplicity. How to approach literature after Celine, it's a question that can be asked after reading his novels. Whatever we call the greatest French writer of the twentieth century, I seem condemned writers of his generation and those of the following never able to overtake, to stay forever inside the borders the novel called classic and not go beyond the limits, or little.
