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Diary of a Country Priest, by Georges Bernanos
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In this classic Catholic novel, Bernanos movingly recounts the life of a young French country priest who grows to understand his provincial parish while learning spiritual humility himself. Awarded the Grand Prix for Literature by the Academie Francaise, The Diary of a Country Priest was adapted into an acclaimed film by Robert Bresson. "A book of the utmost sensitiveness and compassion...it is a work of deep, subtle and singularly encompassing art." — New York Times Book Review (front page)
- Sales Rank: #3277686 in Books
- Published on: 1983-10
- Original language: English
- Binding: Hardcover
- 298 pages
Amazon.com Review
An idealistic young Catholic priest in an isolated French village keeps a diary describing the unheroic suffering and the petty internal conflicts of his parish. This may sound like a thin plot for a novel, but Diary of a Country Priest, by George Bernanos, remains one of the 20th century's most vivid evocations of saintly life. First published in 1937, Bernanos's Diary describes a faithful man's experience of failure. In his diary, the priest records feelings of inferiority and sadness that he cannot express to his parishioners. And as he approaches death, from cancer, the priest's saintliness remains unclear to him, but becomes undeniable to the reader. "How easy it is to hate oneself! True grace is to forget. Yet if pride could die in us, the supreme grace would be to love oneself in all simplicity--as one would love any one of those who themselves have suffered and loved in Christ." --Michael Joseph Gross
Review
Novel by Georges Bernanos, published in French as Journal d'un cure de campagne in 1936. The narrative mainly takes the form of a journal kept by a young parish priest during the last year of his troubled life. He records his spiritual struggle over what he perceives as the ineffectuality of his efforts to improve the lives of his impoverished and misguided parishioners. Physically, he battles a stomach ailment that local gossip attributes to drunkenness. His role in the conversion of a wealthy countess, who suddenly dies, aggravates his moral ambivalence and draws reproof from his superiors, as well as from the woman's family. His stomach condition worsens, and he seeks medical attention too late. In the deathbed ritual of absolution, however, he expresses an abiding faith that transcends his own and his fellows' failures. -- The Merriam-Webster Encyclopedia of Literature
Language Notes
Text: English, French (translation)
Most helpful customer reviews
11 of 11 people found the following review helpful.
a masterpiece
By Randolph Severson
This novel is a masterpiece. It's beauty, truth and goodness steal upon you slowly as you realize through the understated prose, some of which is lapidary in wisdom, that describes the most monotonous, routine kind of life and parish ministry of a young Priest in France who is filled with a dolorous self doubt, incomprehension, boredom and sense of futility that verges on despair, targeted by village gossip and afflicted by an undiagnosed cancer, that grace is working, on him and through him. As a work of art, it is nearly perfectly constructed, possessing a radiant, formal beauty. The form is certainly matched to content. reading the book itself is inevitably to be enveloped by the bleakness and to identify with the Priest: it is an astringent, depressing experience relieved only with the gradual realization that something astonishing is happening. As a document humain it is unsurpassed in its sensitive and redemptive portrayal of the emptiness and ennui of so much of modern life through which and on which the action of grace continues to work. I highly recommend this book but I recommend too that the reader be patient and dutiful as is the Priest and in this way, as does the Priest -- who is never named and is, thus, in this way, Everyman and woman -- offer one's self,with humility, to something greater.
6 of 7 people found the following review helpful.
The "coming of age" story of a Catholic Priest.
By Peter S. Bradley
The "coming of age" story is a definitive genre. Usually, it is the story that we are handed in high school and which somehow we identify with because the main character is going through the same issues and has the same concerns we had at the time, albeit perhaps in a more romantic, more elevated way. I'm thinking here of works like James Joyce's "The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man" and Ernest Hemingway's "Farewell to Arms" and J.D. Salinger's "Catcher in the Rye."
Unfortunately, if you miss those books as a young person, you may not be able to recapture the magic of those books. I've read a few of these books as a mature adult and I found the characters mostly insufferable. Listening to them express disappointment in the world and how it does not measure up to their expectations.
This books is almost the opposite of those books, and, strangely, it is one that I can relate to more - now, perhaps, than I could have at a younger age. In that I am perhaps like the writer of the preface, whose reading of it caused him to leave the seminary.
The story is about a young, unnamed priest who takes over an isolated, inbred, suspicious, bored and mostly unchristian. The priest is from the lowest order of peasants and had an impoverished childhood, but somehow he has learned an incredible humility and patience. His parishioners are suspicious of him and play pranks on him and take advantage of him when they can. His upbringing without money or business knowledge leaves him vulnerable to his parishioners. He also suffers stomach pain, which prevents him from eating, leaving him emaciated and weak. But the priest's innocence and humility have an effect on his parishioners, which he seems to be unaware.
The age of the priest is never specified - I get the sense of him being in his late 20s, based on one passage. If you've lived through that age and been given charge of some special responsibility to others, then you know that the sense of responsibility is intense, with its constant questioning of what is the right thing to do and the knowledge of your lack of experience and wisdom. I found that part of the character to be quite an accurate representation of the process of growing into a mature adulthood.
The story is formed in the manner of a diary, and like a diary it is episodic. The diarist does not tell everything he knows. Sometimes we watch exchanges that are perplexing in their development. The discussion with Mlle. Chantal, for example, seems to beg the question of how the priest knew about the letter that she was carrying. Likewise, the death of Dr. Delbende starts out as a hunting accident, but gradually is identified as a suicide with foreshadowing of issues for the priest. But, again, this is supposed to be a diary, and we don't write everything down in our diaries. The reader should just let the book flow and follow along.
For me, the story started out slow, but toward the middle, particularly the meeting with Madame Contess, it picked up steam. By the end, particularly when the priest is diagnosed and has his conversation with the woman his former seminary friend is living with, it becomes powerful, particularly with the closing lines that "Does it matter? Grace is everywhere...."
There is a story here, and character development, but there are also long orations by particular characters which express what must have been Bernanos views on religion, culture and the state. These are worth reading and contemplating, such as the offhand comment by a friendly French soldier that the "The last real soldier died on May 30, 1431, and you killed her, you people." (p. 245.) I particularly liked this:
"It greatly comforts me also, to think that nobody has been guilty of real harshness towards me - not to say the great word: injustice. I certainly respect those victims of iniquity who are able to find in that knowledge some basis of strength and hope. Somehow I should always hate to think myself - though unwittingly - the cause or merely the pretext of another's sin.
Even from the Cross, when Our Lord in His agony found the perfection of His saintly Humanity - even then He did not own Himself a victim of injustice: They know not what they do. Words that have meaning for the youngest child, words some would like to call childish, but the spirits of evil must have been muttering them ever since without understanding, and with ever-growing terror. Instead of the thunderbolts they awaited it as though a Hand of innocence closed over the chasm of their dwelling." (p. 292.)
Clearly this is an introspective book about religion and spiritual matters. If the reader is looking for something with more action, then they should pass this by, but if they want an interesting examination of the journey of a soul, this is a book worth reading.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful.
The Title Is Accurate
By H. Knapp
The long and detailed forward for this book claims this is an actual diary of an actual priest in a small church in a small village in France. That is believable. Translated from the French with abbreviations of titles and names as you would probably do yourself for long names you write often. Like other reviewers, I found it somewhat difficult to read and spent most of the book thinking I would put it back on the shelf pretty soon but did not. The reality of a real person writing for himself in real time makes it difficult in spots but the reality of it clarifies eventually. I did not like it much until the end but I am glad I read it, a unique reading experience, for me at least.
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