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Louis-Ferdinand Selin (1894-1961) is a classic of literature of the 20th century, a writer with a tragic fate, having a reputation as a actress, anarchist, cynic and an extreme individualist. The author of the scandalously famous novels “Travel to the end of the night” (1932), “Death on Credit” (1936) and other, as well as no less scandalous racist and anti -Semitic pamphlets. The accused of cooperation with the German occupation authorities during the Second World War Selin was forced to flee Germany, and then to Denmark, where he spends several post -war years: first in prison, and then in exile ... The events of this period were reflected in the trilogy: From the castle to the castle ”(1957),“ North ”(1960) and“ Rigodon ”(1969)
The novel“ From the Castle to the Castle ”could be entitled“ The Land of the Night ”. The castles about which Selin speaks are actually strange, nightmare ghosts, whose name is war, hatred, poverty. Selin turns out to be the inhabitant of the castle three times: in Sigmaringen in the company of Marshal Peten and its ministers, in Denmark, where he was in prison for 18 months, then several more years on a destroyed farm, and finally in the Medon, where he practices As a doctor, and where his entire clientele is several of the same poor as himself, patients. This is not so much a novel as a confession, for the objectivity of Selin is not peculiar. With inimitable humor, he describes the distraught Germans, who all Europe, the ministers of Vichy without ministries and Marshal on the eve of the court collapse on his head. This is a view of the war on the other hand, a look belonging to a brilliant writer, endowed with an amazing ability to see what can be called the “outskirts of life.”
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