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Books Like A Burnt-Out Case
Best books to read after A Burnt-Out Case by Graham Greene
A Burnt-Out Case is Greene at his most desolate and most honest — a man who has exhausted every form of belief retreating to a place where the question of belief is organized around bodies rather than souls. If the novel's spiritual exhaustion and its portrait of a man who cannot feel moved you, these books share its concern with the relationship between faith and emptiness, its use of an exotic setting as a moral laboratory, and its willingness to follow a character to the furthest reach of their condition.
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Buy on AmazonThe Power and the Glory
by Graham Greene
The essential companion — the whisky priest in revolutionary Mexico whose terrible faith is the opposite of Querry's exhausted faithlessness; the contrast between the priest's desperate belief and Querry's incapacity for belief defines the range of Greene's Catholic vision
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Buy on AmazonThe Heart of the Matter
by Graham Greene
The companion in Greene's African Catholic fiction — Major Scobie in West Africa, destroyed by his own compassion; the contrast between Scobie (who cannot stop caring) and Querry (who cannot care at all) shows the two poles of Greene's Catholic portraits of failure
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Buy on AmazonThe Plague
by Albert Camus
The essential French parallel — Dr. Rieux fighting a plague in Oran without belief in anything but human solidarity; both are organized around a professional man in a medical context who refuses transcendent consolation; where Camus arrives at solidarity, Greene arrives at something darker — the man who cannot even feel solidary
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Buy on AmazonSilence
by Shūsaku Endō
Endō's novel about a Jesuit priest in seventeenth-century Japan who is forced to apostatize by watching his converts tortured — the essential Japanese Catholic parallel to A Burnt-Out Case; both are organized around the silence of God in the face of human suffering, and both refuse to resolve that silence comfortably
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Buy on AmazonThe End of the Affair
by Graham Greene
The companion in Greene's autobiographical Catholic fiction — Sarah Miles's impossible faith and Bendrix's faithlessness; the most personal of his Catholic novels and the one that most directly gives context for the spiritual condition that A Burnt-Out Case dramatizes through the figure of Querry
- 6Buy on Amazon
Doctor Zhivago
by Boris Pasternak
The companion in the tradition of the professional man who retreats from history into a private life — Yuri Zhivago's attempt to preserve private human values against the claims of political ideology; both are organized around the question of whether private virtue can survive in a world that demands public commitment
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Buy on AmazonThe Trial
by Franz Kafka
The essential existentialist parallel — Josef K.'s arrest and trial by an authority he never understands; where Greene's Querry has exhausted himself fighting a God he no longer believes in, Kafka's Josef K. is destroyed by a judgment he cannot even identify; both are organized around the religious structure of guilt and judgment emptied of its theological content
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Buy on AmazonGoing to Meet the Man
by James Baldwin
Baldwin's story collection — the most important parallel in American fiction to A Burnt-Out Case's portrait of what violence and racial injustice do to a person's capacity for normal feeling; both are concerned with the spiritual damage inflicted by systems of power on the people who serve them and the people they oppress
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