Recommendations
Books Like La Symphonie pastorale by André Gide
Books for readers who loved the unreliable pastor narrator and Gide's precise study of self-deception
La Symphonie pastorale (1919) is Gide's most perfectly controlled novella — a pastor's journal that reveals, without ever quite saying so, that he has fallen in love with the blind girl he has educated and is using Scripture to justify what he refuses to name. These 8 books share its unreliable narration, its interest in religious self-deception, and its study of the harm done in the name of love.
- 1Buy on Amazon
The Go-Between
by L.P. Hartley
An adult narrator looking back at a summer in his boyhood when he unknowingly carried letters between a young woman and her tenant farmer lover — the same structure of a narrator who does not understand what he is part of until it is too late, told with the same controlled irony.
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Buy on AmazonLolita
by Vladimir Nabokov
The supreme example of the self-justifying first-person narrator — Humbert's elaborate aesthetic and literary defences of his behaviour are the most sophisticated version of exactly what Gide's pastor does with Scripture; both novels ask the reader to see through the narrator's prose.
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Buy on AmazonThe Remains of the Day
by Kazuo Ishiguro
Stevens narrates his own life with the same careful deployment of self-justifying language as the pastor — in both cases the narrator has organised his account so as to avoid seeing what he has done and what he has lost.
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Buy on AmazonThe Scarlet Letter
by Nathaniel Hawthorne
A Puritan minister who has committed the sin he publicly condemns — the American version of the pastor's situation, with the added dimension of public hypocrisy where Gide's pastor is primarily a private self-deceiver.
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Buy on AmazonAtonement
by Ian McEwan
A narrator who misreads what she sees with catastrophic consequences and then spends her life rewriting the story — the same theme of perception distorted by desire and self-interest.
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Buy on AmazonDangerous Liaisons
by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos
The French epistolary novel of calculation, manipulation, and the corruption of feeling — a colder version of the self-justification that the pastor carries out: both books are about what people tell themselves about their own motives.
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Buy on AmazonThe Aspern Papers
by Henry James
James's first-person narrator rationalises a series of deceptions in pursuit of literary papers — a compact study in how intelligent people lie to themselves about what they are doing and why.
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Buy on AmazonPale Fire
by Vladimir Nabokov
Kinbote's mad commentary on a dead poet's poem is an extreme and comic version of the same self-serving narrative distortion that the pastor practises on Scripture — the reader sees Shade's poem; Kinbote sees only himself.
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