In the last twenty years Louis-Ferdinand Céline has emerged, in the opinion of many critics, as one of the most important French novelists of the twentieth century. This turnaround in his literary fortunes is one of the most interesting stories in modern literature and is understandable if one remembers that Céline's work was the object of what amounts to a conspiracy of silence by French (mostly leftist) intellectuals from the end of World War II until about the mid 1960s. Having been accused of collaborating with the Nazis during the war, he was for a long time treated as a persona non grata; it took almost twenty years for his name to be cleared. Once it became apparent that despite his vocal anti-Semitism of the late 1930s he had not been a Nazi collaborator during the Occupation, younger Frenchmen were at last able to...