Recommendations

Books Like Moïra by Julien Green

Novels of sexual obsession and the body at war with the spirit

Green's Joseph destroys the girl whose existence makes his Puritanism impossible — desire and religion in absolute, catastrophic conflict. These novels share that same world in which sexuality and religious guilt are inextricably linked and the resolution is always destruction.

  1. Adrienne Mesurat cover
    1

    Adrienne Mesurat

    by Julien Green

    The French provincial counterpart to Moïra — a girl's obsessive love for a doctor she cannot reach; the same psychological extreme in a French bourgeois setting rather than the American South

    Buy on Amazon
  2. Thérèse Desqueyroux cover
    2

    Thérèse Desqueyroux

    by François Mauriac

    Mauriac's trapped provincial woman — the French bourgeois world that produces the same catastrophic resolution as Green's American one; the comparison illuminates both novelists

    Buy on Amazon
  3. Wise Blood cover
    3

    Wise Blood

    by Flannery O'Connor

    O'Connor's Southern Gothic — Hazel Motes and the Church Without Christ; the American Protestant equivalent of Green's French Catholic investigation of sexuality and religious horror

    Buy on Amazon
  4. The Sound and the Fury cover
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    The Sound and the Fury

    by William Faulkner

    Faulkner's Southern Gothic — the Compson family and the obsession with Caddy's sexuality; the American literary tradition in which Green's southern novels are embedded

    Buy on Amazon
  5. Mont-Cinère cover
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    Mont-Cinère

    by Julien Green

    Green's first novel — New England avarice and obsession; the American material in its first form; essential for understanding the arc from Green's American to French novels

    Buy on Amazon
  6. Léviathan cover
    6

    Léviathan

    by Julien Green

    Green's most supernatural novel — a provincial town, a man's obsession with a prostitute, the Catholic horror of the body at its most extreme; the darkest of the French-setting Green novels

    Buy on Amazon
  7. Le Journal d'un curé de campagne cover
    7

    Le Journal d'un curé de campagne

    by Georges Bernanos

    The French Catholic counterpart — Bernanos's country priest moving through spiritual failure toward grace; the theological world that Green shares, in its French Catholic rather than American Protestant form

    Buy on Amazon
  8. Sanctuary cover
    8

    Sanctuary

    by William Faulkner

    Faulkner's most violent novel — Temple Drake and the violence that erupts from sexual obsession; the American Southern model that underlies Green's treatment of the same territory

    Buy on Amazon

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