French Fiction, Religion & Beliefs - Fiction, Occupations - Fiction

Under Satan's Sun

Name: Under Satan's Sun
Author: J.C. Whitehouse,Georges Bernanos
ISBN: 9780803261808

by J.C. Whitehouse, Georges Bernanos

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Overview

This new translation marks the seventy-fifth anniversary of Georges Bernanos's first novel, Under Satan's Sun, a powerful account of intense spiritual struggle that reflects the author's deeply-felt religion. The work develops a theme that persistently inspired Bernanos: the existence of evil as a spiritual force and its dramatic role in human destiny. This haunting novel follows the fortunes of a young, gauche, and fervent Catholic priest who is a misfit in the world and in his church, creating scandal and disharmony wherever he turns. His insight into the inner lives of others and his perception of the workings of Satan in the everyday are gifts that fatefully come into play in the priest's chance encounter with a young murderess, whose life and emotions he can see with a dreadful clarity, and whose destiny inexorably becomes entangled with his own.

Synopsis

This new translation marks the seventy-fifth anniversary of Georges Bernanos's first novel, Under Satan's Sun, a powerful account of intense spiritual struggle that reflects the author's deeply-felt religion. The work develops a theme that persistently inspired Bernanos: the existence of evil as a spiritual force and its dramatic role in human destiny. ø This haunting novel follows the fortunes of a young, gauche, and fervent Catholic priest who is a misfit in the world and in his church, creating scandal and disharmony wherever he turns. His insight into the inner lives of others and his perception of the workings of Satan in the everyday are gifts that fatefully come into play in the priest's chance encounter with a young murderess, whose life and emotions he can see with a dreadful clarity, and whose destiny inexorably becomes entangled with his own.

About the Author, J.C. Whitehouse,Georges Bernanos

Georges Bernanos (1888–1948) was one of the twentieth century's most forceful and idiosyncratic writers and perhaps the most original Roman Catholic writer of his time. He wrote most of his major fiction in a period of barely twelve years, between 1926 and 1937, including his best-known work, The Diary of a Country Priest. J. C. Whitehouse is Reader in Comparative Literature at the University of Bradford. He is the author of Vertical Man: The Human Being in the Catholic Novels of Graham Greene, Sigrid Undset, and Georges Bernanos and the translator of many books, including Bernanos's The Impostor (Nebraska 1999).

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Editorials

Kirkus Reviews

First published in 1926 and long unavailable in English translation, this vivid debut novel by the eminent French Catholic author (1888-1948) is a solid stepping-stone pointing toward the greater achievements of Bernanos's Diary of a Country Priest and The Impostor. It examines the fervent religiosity of a rural cleric given to self-flagellation and delusions of godlike powers-in his dealings with a farm girl betrayed into prostitution, a dying child, and, in its astonishing central section, Satan himself (in the guise of a garrulous horse-trader). Episodic, indifferently constructed, and often hyperbolic, yet suffused with a dramatic intensity that makes one understand why Bernanos has sometimes been likened to Dostoevsky. Not all readers will agree, but Under Satan's Sun should not be missed.