For U. S. readers, Louis-Ferdinand Céline's Journey to the End of the Night made strong reading, even in its greatly expurgated translation. But that violent and gory novel is a model of Puritan self-restraint compared with Céline's new, untranslated and probably untranslatable Trifles for a Massacre, current sensation of French literature, in which the novelist's genius for invective, hatred of modern civilization and fertility in cursing it have exploded in an anti-Semitic tirade calculated to end all anti-Semitic tirades, to make Nazis turn green with envy.
What made M. Céline an...
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