Wyatt Mason, whose Sentences blog for Harpers is much missed, writes in the NYRB about Céline, not least his anti-semitism, one of the more virulent strands of his misanthropy.

To read any single novel by Céline is to receive, in a bracing style, a hysterical primer on the abjection of being. To read them all is to register a unique species of racism: a hatred not of particular elements of humanity but of the human race as a whole. Thus Jean Giono said of Céline’s writing, “If Céline had truly believed what he wrote, he would have killed himself.”