Recommendations
Books Like Le Journal d'un curé de campagne by Georges Bernanos
Novels of grace, failure, and the spiritual life as warfare
Bernanos's country priest is incompetent, despised, and dying — and moves through that failure toward a grace that strips everything away. These novels share that same Augustinian world in which the abject failure can be the vehicle of complete sanctity.
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Buy on AmazonSous le soleil de Satan
by Georges Bernanos
Bernanos's first novel — Donissan's encounter with the devil on a country road; the most extreme statement of the same theological vision as the Journal; read after the masterpiece
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Buy on AmazonThérèse Desqueyroux
by François Mauriac
The other great French Catholic psychological novel — Mauriac's bourgeois wife who poisoned her husband without knowing why; the social and provincial counterpart to Bernanos's supernatural world
- 3Buy on Amazon
Le Journal d'un curé de campagne
by Robert Bresson
Bresson's 1951 film — not a book but the essential companion; one of the greatest films ever made; Bresson transposes Bernanos's prose directly and finds cinematic equivalents for everything
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Buy on AmazonLe Nœud de vipères
by François Mauriac
Vipers' Tangle — the other great Mauriac novel; a dying man's confession of a lifetime of hatred; Mauriac's Catholic psychological method at its most concentrated
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Buy on AmazonLa Joie
by Georges Bernanos
Joy — Bernanos's Prix Femina novel; Chantal de Clergerie and the spiritual joy that frightens those around her; the continuation of the country priest's spiritual world in a new character
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Buy on AmazonThe Power and the Glory
by Graham Greene
Graham Greene's whisky priest in Mexico — the most direct English equivalent to Bernanos's country priest; a priest who is a coward and a sinner and through whom grace operates despite everything
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Buy on AmazonLes Grands cimetières sous la lune
by Georges Bernanos
The political essay — Bernanos's denunciation of Franco's atrocities; the political conscience that underlies the theological fiction; essential for the complete picture of Bernanos
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Buy on AmazonMoïra
by Julien Green
The American Catholic equivalent — Green's Southern college novel of sexual obsession and religious horror; a different Catholic world but the same conviction that the body and spirit are at perpetual war
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