"We must listen carefully to Bernanos to learn how love and indignation, obedience and a critical spirit, can interpenetrate fruitfully in a . . . heart."
-Hans Urs von Balthasar
"The stakes in Bernanos feel just as vital as in any war fiction. This is because, for Bernanos, the characters' souls are on the line."
-Phil Klay, recipient of the National Book Award
Georges Bernanos' first novel
Under Satan's Sun
grips the problem of evil like a firebrand and does not let go no matter the burn. 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 come into play in the priest's fateful 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.
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
.
ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR
J. C. Whitehouse (R.I.P.) was 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.