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Georges Bernanos (1888–1948) was born in Paris and studied for his license in Law and Literature at the University of Paris. He was the author of many novels, including Diary of a Country Priest, also adapted for film by Bresson. His Dialogues des Carmelites was used by composer Francois Poulenc as the libretto for the opera by the same title. »
Fanny Howe is the author of more than twenty books of poetry and prose. She was the recipient of the 2001 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize for her Selected Poems, and has won awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Poetry Foundation, the California Council for the Arts, and The Village Voice. She was short-listed for the Griffin Poetry Prize in 2001 and 2005. »
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Mouchette
One of the great mavericks of French literature, Georges Bernanos combined raw realism with a spiritual focus of visionary intensity. Mouchette stands with his celebrated Diary of a Country Priest as the perfection of his singular art.
"Nothing but a little savage" is how the village school-teacher describes fourteen-year-old Mouchette, and that view is echoed by every right-thinking local citizen. Mouchette herself doesn't bother to contradict it; ragged, foulmouthed, dirt-poor, a born liar and loser, she knows herself to be, in the words of the story, "alone, completely alone, against everyone." Hers is a tale of "tragic solitude" in which despair and salvation appear to be inextricably intertwined.
Bernanos' uncompromising genius was a powerful inspiration to Flannery O'Connor, and Mouchette was the source of a celebrated movie by Robert Bresson.
Reviews
Simply and directly told, this novel relates the story of the young outcast peasant girl, Mouchette . . . and her search for the compassion and strength to combat her loneliness. A beautiful and moving short novel—compassionate, perceptive, lyrical.
— Publishers Weekly
Nabokov complained that Turgenev essentially moved characters around in order for them to have conversations; and Bernanos moves them around in order for them to confess to each other. These confessions, which involve long speeches, sometimes of many pages, are extraordinarily affecting and frequently beautiful. Bernanos is, like Dostoevsky, something of a sensationalist of the soul. While Dostoevsky's characters speak to each other in the same kind of mashed and ripely careless prose in which Dostoevsky writes, Bernanos's priests and parishioners speak a formal and poetic discourse, full of metaphor and figure.
— James Woods, The New Republic
A tragedy in the great tradition, piteous, harrowing—and ennobling.
— Walker Percy
It possesses the linear perfection of the French classic novel and a concentrated power out of all proportion in its length.
— Martin Turnell, The New York Times
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Format: Paperback
Retail Price: $14.00
Price: $10.50 (25% off)
Nov 21, 2005
152 pages
ISBN: 1590171519
9781590171516
All Literature in Translation
NYRB Classics
Literature in French
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