Customer Reviews

A Mauriac Reader

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Mauriac's writings are beautiful, Christian, and highly charged emotionally, without succumbing to sentimentalism. The French countryside, the bougoise, are both transformed by Mauriac into celestial images of piercing love. This work contains four of his best novels, including the absolutely brilliant "Woman of the Pharisees" and tragically dark "Genetrix." Francois Mauriac is one of the greatest Christian authors of the 20th or any century, and The Mauriac Reader a superb introduction to his craft. In short, if you love literature, get this one.

Setting aside for a moment Mauriac's religious beliefs (and it is fully possible to enjoy his work without sharing his Catholicism) Francois Mauriac was an amazingly skillful writer. His short novels are stylistically conservative-- a straightforward realism rules--and, as far as I know, always comparatively short. But within those formal limits, his ability to offer believable and thoughtful moral dramas without ever lapsing into tendentiousness is remarkable. They have their own sort of gravity, a seriousness that reminds me, oddly enough, of George Eliot, though one of Eliot's works is about as long as 8 or 9 of Mauriac's. Technically what I most admire is Mauriac's ability to represent the passing of time. Even "represent" is too distant a word really; it's as if he captures the sensation of passing time. This edition is a great bargain. It offers a large selection of the complete texts of several important works at a reasonable price. If people 100 years from now are still reading novels they're going to wonder what sort of morons we were to allow such accomplished works to fall into such relative obscurity.