Marilynne Robinson, Gilead

A beautiful novel on “the damaged heart of America.”

As his health is declining, John Ames, a seventy-six-year-old Congregationalist preacher, decides to write his three-year old son, a letter reflecting on his life and the story of his family. Ames’s narrative is a mixture of details of the everyday ministerial life, heartfelt reflections on God, and the stories of his pacifist father and abolitionist grandfather. When Jack Boughton, Ames’s godson, comes back to the town of Gilead, tensions caused by poverty and race arise, inviting comparison between 1950s social unacceptability and the abolitionist fervor of only a couple of generations ago.

Gilead is a quiet, masterful novel on the damaged heart of America, as Ali Smith wrote in The Guardian. In this testimony of struggle and faith that spans three generations of American, Marilynne Robinson seems to murmur a message of hope: ‘Things can and will change; they have before, and they will again.”

Francois Mauriac, Viper’s Tangle

Viper’s Tangle is a lengthy confession from Monsieur Louis — a wealthy lawyer slowly approaching the time of his death. In a bitter and abrasive tone, the old man explains his plans to disinherit his hypocritical bourgeois family. He loathes his wife’s Catholicism exposes her narrow-mindedness, her failures of charity… but he’s not above revealing his own wretched flaws in the most unflattering light. As the narrative unfolds, it becomes clear that the viper’s nest is as much a metaphor for his soul as it is for his family.

With Vipers’ Tangle, Francois Mauriac, winner of the Nobel Prize in 1937, offers us a disturbing journey to the heart of an odious man. But in this tragedy of a man who has closed himself off from a community of love, the Catholic writer reminds us that God’s grace is accessible to anyone.

Andre Dubus, Meditation from a Moveable Chair

This collection of twenty-five luminous and intensely personal essays, most of which originally appeared in magazines like The New Yorker, Harper’s, and Yankee, are a testament to the author’s vulnerability, vision, and indestructible faith. In these pages, the author lingers over experiences past and present, and elaborates on being a writer, a divorced Catholic, and father. As is the case in his short stories, Dubus cuts straight to the heart of things to deliver a work that is “suffused with grace, bathed in a kind of spiritual glow.” (The New York Times Book Review).

Georges Bernanos, Diary of a Country Priest

1937. An inexperienced, devout and idealistic priest arrives at his first parish, in Ambricourt, a little village in the North of France marked by poverty. He begins a diary in which he relates his many failures and humiliations. Though his kindness is misunderstood, and his “genuine” mistakes are used against him, the priest remains determined to pay daily visits to his parishioners. The narrative follows the thread of flamboyant conversations between the young curate – who is suffering from terrible stomach aches – and a confused little girl, an atheist doctor, a long-grieving countess, her malicious teenage daughter, and a soldier of fortune, among many others.

The Diary of a Country Priest remains one of the most vivid evocations of saintly life in literature.

Emmanuel Carrère, Le Royaume

A flowing, extraordinary, and extravagant novel, Le Royaume is strikingly ambitious: it seeks to tell the story of the beginnings of Christianity through the lives of Paul and Luke while also inquiring about the nature of religious mysticism. It traces the thread of the notion of “mad belief,” which the author himself has long subscribed to. As is often the case in his novels, Carrère uses his own personal struggle and existential quest as a point of departure. In so doing he has composed an indefinable, wise, educational, precise, and ironic novel. A magnificent internal voyage.