Survival as a guilt to be exorcised and which must create its own, nonidealistic style; survival as the only possible fixed value in an inhospitable world: into this category [A.] Alvarez attempts to place those writers who have minimised their moral and literary pretensions [in his essay "The Literature of the Holocaust"].

It is a category which appears, initially, to aid comprehension of certain aspects of the work of Céline. At an early point in the narrator's reminiscences of his childhood, in Mort à crédit, he recounts the visit of the family to the Exposition Universelle of 1900. The exhibition-site is swarming with a vast, frightening crowd. At every turn, at every stand, the family, terrified, take to flight…. The emphasis in this scene upon the need for flight in order to ensure personal survival, coupled with the deliberately nonidealistic language, would appear to situate it in Alvarez's...