Recommendations
Books Like En Route
Best books to read after En Route by Huysmans
Readers who respond to En Route's account of Durtal's conversion to Catholicism, its treatment of Gregorian chant and the liturgy as aesthetic and spiritual experience, and Huysmans's journey from Decadence to monastic life will find the wider tradition of French Catholic literary conversion.
- 1Buy
Là-Bas
by Joris-Karl Huysmans
Là-Bas is the essential predecessor of En Route: the occult investigation that prepares Durtal's conversion, showing him that spiritual reality exists before Catholicism provides him with the framework for relating to it.
- 2Buy
La Cathédrale
by Joris-Karl Huysmans
La Cathédrale (1898) is the immediate continuation of En Route: where En Route follows Durtal to the Trappist monastery and his initial conversion, La Cathédrale follows him to Chartres and the discovery of the Catholic aesthetic tradition that sustains his converted life.
- 3Buy
Apologia pro vita sua
by John Henry Newman
Newman's 1864 account of his conversion from Anglicanism to Catholicism is the most important English parallel to En Route: both are first-person accounts of an intellectual and spiritual journey from a Protestant or rationalist position to Roman Catholicism, driven by the discovery that no other available framework can account for the spiritual reality the author has encountered.
- 4Buy
The Seven Storey Mountain
by Thomas Merton
Merton's 1948 Catholic conversion narrative and account of his entry into the Cistercian monastery of Gethsemani is the twentieth-century American equivalent of En Route: both are accounts of a man formed in secular culture who discovers in monastic life the spiritual home that secular culture could not provide.
- 5Buy
The Rule of Saint Benedict
by Saint Benedict
The sixth-century rule that governs the Benedictine and Trappist monasteries that Huysmans visits in En Route and L'Oblat is the essential companion to the Durtal novels: understanding the structure of the liturgical day (the Divine Office, the Mass, the rhythm of ora et labora) illuminates what Durtal is experiencing in the monastery.
- 6Buy
Orthodoxy
by G.K. Chesterton
Chesterton's 1908 account of his intellectual journey to Christianity is the English equivalent of En Route in its argument that the Christian world-view is not a retreat from reason but the most intellectually satisfying account of the full range of human experience — both works argue for Christianity against the inadequacy of materialism.
- 7Buy
À Rebours
by Joris-Karl Huysmans
Reading À Rebours after En Route shows the full spiritual arc of Huysmans's life work: the aesthete who constructed an artificial paradise in À Rebours eventually discovers in En Route that the liturgy of the Catholic Church provides the only genuine aesthetic and spiritual experience that can satisfy the needs that À Rebours attempted to satisfy by artificial means.
- 8Buy
Brideshead Revisited
by Evelyn Waugh
Waugh's 1945 novel about an aristocratic English Catholic family and the narrator's gradual discovery of Catholicism through his friendship with them is the twentieth-century English equivalent of En Route: both novels trace a conversion through aesthetic and emotional experience rather than intellectual argument.
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