Recommendations
Books Like Thérèse Desqueyroux by François Mauriac
Novels of the guilty conscience and the provincial bourgeois world
Thérèse poisoned her husband without knowing why — Mauriac's most radical formal choice is the refusal to explain. These novels share that same refusal: the guilty conscience that cannot account for itself, the provincial world that produces it, the Catholicism that names it sin without healing it.
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Buy on AmazonLe Nœud de vipères
by François Mauriac
Vipers' Tangle — the other great Mauriac; a dying man's confession of a lifetime of hatred; the Catholic psychological method in its most concentrated form
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Buy on AmazonLa Fin de la nuit
by François Mauriac
The End of the Night — the direct continuation of Thérèse Desqueyroux; Thérèse in Paris, still unable to live or die; read immediately after the first novel
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Buy on AmazonLe Journal d'un curé de campagne
by Georges Bernanos
The other great French Catholic novel — the country priest's spiritual failure as the vehicle of grace; Bernanos's supernatural world is the counterpoint to Mauriac's psychological one
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Buy on AmazonThe Woman Who Was Poor
by Léon Bloy
La Femme pauvre — Bloy's novel of absolute poverty and grace; the godfather of French Catholic fiction whose vision Bernanos and Mauriac both inherit, though in very different ways
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Buy on AmazonGenitrix
by François Mauriac
The early Mauriac masterpiece — a possessive mother and the son she suffocates; the essential earlier Mauriac before Thérèse; the possessive love as Mauriac's central subject
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Buy on AmazonBrighton Rock
by Graham Greene
Greene's novel of the young Catholic gangster Pinkie — the shared Catholic framework of sin, guilt, and grace that Mauriac and Greene both use for psychological analysis in a very different social setting
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Buy on AmazonAdrienne Mesurat
by Julien Green
Green's French provincial equivalent — a girl trapped by obsessive love in a provincial town; the same claustrophobic provincial bourgeois world as Thérèse, the same inexplicable violence
- 8Buy on Amazon
Un Lien d'or
by François Mauriac
The late Mauriac short novel — the return to the Landes and to the same bourgeois world as Thérèse; essential for understanding the range of Mauriac's career
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