It is Germany near the end of World War II, the Allies have landed and members of the Vichy France government have been sequestered in a labyrinthine castle, replete with secret passages and subterranean hideaways. The group of 1,400 terrified officials, their wives, mistresses, flunkies, and Nazi protectors—including Céline, his wife, their cat, and an actor friend—attempt to postpone the postwar reckoning under the constant threat of air raids and starvation. With an undercurrent of sensual excitement, Céline paints an almost unbearably vivid picture of human society and the human condition.,br>Called by Atlantic Monthly "the blackest of the black" of Céline's novels and hailed by the Washington Post Book World for its "intense sympathy with individual human beings," Castle to Castle is brilliantly rendered in Ralph Manheim's translation, for which he won the National Book Award.