Georges Bernanos
France
Stark, feverish, unrelenting: interior struggle rendered with an almost physical intensity, faith wrung out of the body rather than offered as comfort.
Bernanos began on the political right, an activist for the royalist Action Française before breaking with the movement over its treatment of faith as a mere political tool. He was wounded fighting in the First World War, and didn't publish his first novel, Under the Sun of Satan, until his late thirties.
Diary of a Country Priest (1936) won the Académie française's grand prize for the novel and remains his most demanding statement of a lifelong theme: grace arriving only through suffering, never comfort. Appalled by the Munich Agreement's appeasement of Hitler, he left France for Brazil in 1938 and spent the war years there writing fierce anti-Vichy pamphlets from exile.
He returned to France after the Liberation and died in Paris in 1948.
Their books in the atlas
- 1926
Under the Sun of SatanLvl 7philosophical novel - 1936
Diary of a Country PriestLvl 6philosophical novel
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