Recommendations
Books Like L'Oblat
Best books to read after L'Oblat by Huysmans
Readers who respond to L'Oblat's account of the Benedictine liturgical year, the monastic life, and the destruction of French monastic culture by anti-clerical legislation will find the wider tradition of French Catholic monastic literature.
- 1Buy
La Cathédrale
by Joris-Karl Huysmans
La Cathédrale is the essential predecessor of L'Oblat: the recognition of Chartres as the supreme Catholic aesthetic object in La Cathédrale prepares Durtal for the attempt to live permanently in the vicinity of the Catholic liturgical world that L'Oblat documents.
- 2Buy
En Route
by Joris-Karl Huysmans
En Route (1895) is the founding conversion experience that everything in L'Oblat depends on: reading En Route before L'Oblat shows how Durtal's Trappist retreat eight years earlier prepared him for the oblate life that L'Oblat documents.
- 3Buy
The Seven Storey Mountain
by Thomas Merton
Merton's account of his entry into the Cistercian monastery of Gethsemani is the twentieth-century American equivalent of L'Oblat: both are accounts of men who found in the Benedictine-Cistercian monastic tradition the spiritual and intellectual home that secular culture could not provide.
- 4Buy
The Cloister and the Hearth
by Charles Reade
Reade's historical novel about the father of Erasmus shows the monastic world of the late Middle Ages from the inside, providing the historical depth to the Benedictine tradition that Huysmans is joining in L'Oblat: understanding what the monasteries preserved through the Middle Ages illuminates what their destruction by the anti-clerical laws means.
- 5Buy
A Journal of a Soul
by Pope John XXIII
Angelo Roncalli's (later John XXIII) spiritual diary, which he kept throughout his life and which includes entries from his own experiences with Benedictine spirituality, is the closest autobiographical parallel to L'Oblat's documentation of the attempt to live the liturgical year as a lay person.
- 6Buy
À Rebours
by Joris-Karl Huysmans
Reading À Rebours after L'Oblat shows the complete arc of Huysmans's spiritual journey: the aesthete Des Esseintes who constructed an artificial paradise to replace nature in 1884 has become the oblate Durtal who lives according to the liturgical calendar of the Benedictine community in 1903 — both are attempts to create a total environment that transcends the secular world.
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Brideshead Revisited
by Evelyn Waugh
Waugh's great Catholic novel shows the same discovery of Benedictine monastic culture as a surviving remnant of the Catholic world that the secular modern world has destroyed: both L'Oblat and Brideshead Revisited are elegies for a Catholic civilization that the twentieth century is in the process of eliminating.
- 8Buy
The Benedictine Office
by Saint Benedict
The Divine Office — the cycle of eight daily prayer services that structures the Benedictine day — is the central subject of L'Oblat's documentation of the liturgical year, and understanding its structure (Matins, Lauds, Prime, Terce, Sext, None, Vespers, Compline) and content is essential for following Durtal's experience of the monastic world.
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