Ana the Imp (Free subscription) | 11/23/2009
Who is your favourite fascist novelist? I quite like the work of the madly eccentric French novelist Louis-Ferdinand Céline, particularly Journey to the End of the Night , but my absolute favourite really has to be Knut Hamsun, the great Norwegian writer and Nobel laureate. My, oh, my, how could one possibly like fascist writing? But that’s just the point: it’s not...
Late Reviews and Latest Obsessions (Free subscription) | 11/20/2009
... I have read and listened to (and enjoyed) books whose authors I disagreed with wholeheartedly. Louis-Ferdinand Celine was a Nazi sympathizer but I have seven of his novels on my shelf and they're great fun. They're not great fun because they're filled with Nazi propaganda and vicious anti-Semitism; they're great fun because they're not religious tracts; they're models of style...
French Politics (Free subscription) | 10/26/2009
It is a profound embarrassment to champions of French literary humanism that Louis-Ferdinand Céline is at once a writer of undeniable amplitude, incontournable , as they say, and the author of three virulent anti-Semitic tracts, Bagatelles pour un massacre, L'Ecole des cadavres, and Les Beaux draps. But Céline has found a defender in a British critic of Polish Jewish descent,...
