Georges Bernanos

French journalist, polemicist, and novelist Georges Bernanos (1888-1948) is perhaps best known through Robert Bresson's film adaptation ofJournal d'un curé de campagne(winner of theGrand prix du roman de l'Académie française; published in English asDiary of a Country Priest), Francis Poulenc's operatic adaptation ofDialogues des Carmélites, his first novelSous le soleil de Satan, and the essayLes Grands Cimetières sous la Lune. Michael Tobin's study is part literary criticism, part biography. Tobin follows Bernanos and his family from France to Spain during the Civil War and then to Brazil and North Africa. He also provides a thematic synthesis of Bernanos' novels and his extensive body of non-fiction, demonstrating that one fundamental theological truth - the Incarnation of God in Jesus Christ - was the the unifying factor of Bernanos's entangled political and social criticism and the engine of his creative imagination.Recent English translations of some of Bernanos' novels have sparked renewed interest in his work.Georges Bernanosincludes Tobin's translations of essential texts that have never before appeared in English.

Michael R. Tobin is associate professor of French, St. Thomas More College, University of Saskatchewan.