With the Prix Goncourt, France's most prestigious literary prize, due to be awarded in the next few days, I thought it might be worth having a quick look at contemporary French literature. (For previous posts on French lit, click here, here and here.)
Last year's winner was Le sermon sur la chute de Rome by Jérôme Ferrari. I know that I am inclined to grass-is-greenerism but I can't quite imagine a prize-winning novel in the UK drawing its title and its chapter headings from St Augustine.
The year before the prize was won by Alexis Jenni with L'art français de la guerre. What drew most comment was the fact that Jenni was a schoolteacher who wrote this, his first novel, on Sundays when he had a bit of free time, but I couldn't also help but notice his deep-rooted Catholicism.
Another winner of the Prix Goncourt (though in a different category) is Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt with Concerto in Memory of an Angel, which features a story about redemption based around a reworking of the Cain and Abel story.
But it's not just the Prix Goncourt winners who stand out. Another really interesting author is Claire Daudin, who writes clearly in the French Catholic literary tradition. She is not just a novelist in her own right - Le Sourire was the winner of le prix 2009 des Journées du Livre Chrétien - but she is also something of an expert on Peguy, Bernanos and Mauriac.
And if that isn't enough to get you excited, there's a new Asterix book out too.
Just over two years ago I wrote a post bemoaning the lack of translations of Catholic literature from around the world. However, things are beginning to change.
Professor Kevin M. Doak of Georgetown University has now translated Sono Ayako's Kiseki ('Miracles'), a book which focuses on St Maximilian Kolbe's canonisation. It will, I hope, be available in the not too distant future.
However, while we wait Professor Doak has edited another excellent book, Xavier's Legacies: Catholicism in Modern Japanese Culture which has a chapter on Sono Ayako. If you want a flavour read his fascinating introduction via the previous link.
It's not just Japan that is getting a little more exposure: China is beginning to create ripples too. One of Fan Wen's novels is due out in French translation in a fortnight's time.
And, I happened to notice, Pope Francis, who taught literature for a while, quoted Leon Bloy in his inaugural mass in the Sistine Chapel today.
There have been - and still are - some wonderful Chinese Catholic authors. One of the best known of these writers is Wu Li, who was not only one of the orthodox masters of early Qing-dynasty painting but also a poet and Jesuit priest.
The most comprehensive guide to Wu Li can be found here (with further details here) but a more accessible introduction to his work can be found here. According to Chaves, his poetic sequence "'Singing of the Source and Course of Holy Church' succeeds in achieving Wu Li's goal of creating a Chinese Christian poetry, true to Chinese traditions of allusion, parallelism, and other familiar poetic techniques and true also to orthodox Christian theology, piety, and liturgical solemnity." Rather than do him the injustice of a brief quotation, I'll try to return to some of the poems themselves (in Chinese and in English translation) in a later post.
Another great Chinese Catholic writer who is only now beginning to be given her due is Su Xuelin. This article from Harvard's Divinity School is encouraging, though also a little baffling. Although Su Xuelin converted to Catholicism in the 1920s while studying in France, Zhange Ni argues that the religion her alter-ego embraces in Ji Xin, the novel Su Xuelin wrote about her conversion, "is not Catholicism or Western religion per se, but a not-so-readily-available, still-struggling-into-being Chinese discourse of religion, which cannot be reduced to a slavish adoption of modern Western concepts of religion."
However, the importance of Catholicism to Su Xuelin cannot be overestimated: as Zhange Ni herself points out it affected her personal life - she never divorced her husband despite their separation - her scholarship - "The main thesis of Su Xuelin's Chu-Ci scholarship gradually took shape during the 1940s, guided by her Catholic beliefs" - and her later peregrinations - "Unwilling and unable to accept a Communist regime in China, she decided to give up her position at Wuhan University and leave the country. The Catholic Church in Hong Kong offered her a position as editor and translator. ... In 1950, still supported by the Catholic Church in Hong Kong, she sailed to Europe, first to make a pilgrimage to the Vatican, and then to settle in Paris." This was a writer for whom Catholicism mattered - and not the rather etiolated version of Catholicism that secular scholarship often seems to be imply - but Catholicism is all its richness.
But what about today? I've written before about Fan Wen and the good news is that the first volume of his 水乳大地
trilogy is due to be published in French translation in January 2013. Maybe an English translation will follow?
OK, I realise I'm a year late but I don't read the People's Daily that often :)
This time last year the paper chose Canticle to the Land by Catholic novelist, Fan Wen, as one of its Top 5 novels of the year.
There are howls of anguish about the (supposed) demise of the Catholic novel in the English-speaking world so it's good to see that the situation isn't so bleak in the People's Republic.
To read more about Fan Wen's work click here or here. There are no plans for an English translation at the moment but, I hope, a French translation may be published later this year.
