Boxers and Saints

Yesterday was the saints' day of Augustine Zhao Rong and companions, many of whom were martyred during the Boxer Rising at the start of the 20th Century. 

These amazing martyr-saints are not nearly well enough known in the West but help is at hand from Gene Luen Yang, about whom I have posted before. His new book is, in fact, not one book at all but two, Boxers and Saints, which can be read individually or (even better) together.

To read an interview with the author and to get a sneak preview of the books click here and to preorder (with the opportunity to have your books inscribed in Yang's unique way) click here.

'Please Look After Mother' by Kyung-Sook Shin

Please Look After Mother  is a novel that demands attention. It has been translated into over twenty languages, has sold over 2 million copies, and won the 2011 Man Asia Literary Prize, beating off opposition from, among others, Amitav Ghosh, Haruki Murakami, Yan Lianke, and Banana Yoshimoto.

So what has made it so successful?

One potential surprise is that this is a character-driven rather than a plot-driven novel. As the different family members learn what they should have known already about Mother so too do we. There is a gradual accumulation of detail. Revelation is slow. But, because it's slow, it's all the more devastating.

The novel also captures a particular moment in history beautifully. This is a novel about the generation gap, about the problems of modernity. As Kyung-Sook Shin points out in this interview: “It’s the mother who goes missing, but that’s a metaphor. It doesn’t have to be the mom who disappears; it could be anything precious to us that has been lost, as we’ve moved from a traditional society to a modern society.” She adds that, “Kids nowadays are definitely different from the traditional generation that came before us. And I don’t think that’s restricted to Korean society.”  

But what really makes this novel is narrative technique. This is how it opens:

"It's been one week since Mother went missing.

"The family is gathered at your brother Hyong-chol's house, bouncing ideas off each other. You decide to make flyers and hand them out where Mother was last seen."

This is very disconcerting. I am not South Korean. I am not a woman. My mother has not just gone missing. The opening of the novel is therefore deeply unsettling (even alienating in the Brechtian sense). I found myself fighting against it for the first thirty pages or so but, gradually, as the daughter comes to terms not just with her mother's disappearance but also with their limited relationship ("Either a mother and daughter know each other very well, or they are strangers"), I was forced to reconsider my own family relationships. 

Powerful as this opening section is, one of the real strengths of the book is that it does not over-rely on the second person narrative. The second section is written in the third person but with one of the sons as the focaliser. Suddenly we gain another perspective. We learn more about key family relationships. We are back on more familiar ground. 

Only to find that the rug has been pulled out from under our feet in the third section - another second person narrative this time told from the husband's perspective.

By the time we get to the fourth section, where we get to hear Mother's own voice, we feel that we have begun to rediscover her. By realising how badly we have treated her - and we really do feel as though it is we, the readers, who have mistreated her - we come to know her as we have never managed to before.

When Mother speaks (and I won't spoil the plot by explaining the context) we realise that there are many things we have missed. She is a deeply impressive woman, even with her flaws, but a woman we still don't fully know. The mystery of the person is deeper than we have kidded ourselves into thinking that it might be.

So why has this novel been so successful? Because it has something very important to say about the family in the contemporary world and it says it in an unusual and unexpectedly powerful way. 

But there's more to the novel than this. Mother is a Catholic. The novel ends in Rome. In fact it ends with a prayer to Our Lady. A major prize-winning bestseller ends with a prayer to Our Lady. Why? Because it becomes clear that, no matter how much they regret the way they have treated Mother, her children and husband can no longer redeem the past, simply because Mother is now missing. The only possible ending, it seems, is to reach out to another and greater Mother, symbolised in Michelangelo's Pieta in St Peter's. Just when we think we have got to the heart of the mystery, it opens out before us.


P.S.
For more on Korean Catholic literature click here.

Frank Cottrell Boyce

I have written before about Frank Cottrell Boyce, a fascinating author and all-round nice guy. (See here and here and here.)

One of his strengths is that he is difficult to pigeonhole: a homeschooling Catholic parent who used to write reviews for Living Marxism; a scriptwriter for Brookside and Coronation Street who has a D.Phil in 17th Century History; a co-creator of the Olympics opening ceremony who writes great children's books.

In this interview with The Guardian he makes all sorts of interesting points. I've picked out just a few:

In Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, the flying car with a mind of its own, he was presented with a readymade vehicle with which to attempt all these things. Compared with the highly personal ideas and experiences that lay behind previous books, the continuation of the Fleming brand looks baldly commercial. But there is charm and humour in Cottrell Boyce's two sequels (the original was published in three instalments: the plan is to copy this formula and call it a day). This is partly drawn from his pleasure in the fact that the original is that rare thing, an adventure story in which the parents are invited along.

"That would certainly never happen in Roald Dahl," he says. "The problem I had with Chitty is that people remember the movie, which is a Dahl movie [Dahl wrote the screenplay] … there's a supercar, a supervillain and lots of sexual perversity." The Fleming original, by contrast, is "very sweet".

and

Meanwhile Cottrell Boyce and his wife, now back in Liverpool, carried on having children. In all they have seven, aged between eight and 27, four boys and three girls. From his account it is a warm and close family, with the youngest children home-schooled mainly because their parents like having everyone together in the house, but also to shield them from the highly commercialised peer pressure Cottrell Boyce describes as "weaponised advertising". His view of celebrity culture magazines such as Closer borders on disgust.

and

"Being read to at school changed my life. I really became aware of that during the Olympics because we were all of us in that room drawing on stuff we'd read as children and none of it was stuff we were examined on, it wasn't anything measurable. It was stuff that people had shared with us that we went on to share. If you look at that ceremony and what was in it, it was a sense of wonderment in storytelling. We found we had this common heritage – Mary Poppins and so on."

and

Although he probably wouldn't say so, Cottrell Boyce is a writer with a clear moral purpose, who believes the whole point of books is to extend our imaginative reach, and give us pleasure in the process. Recently he has been reading stories by George Saunders, recommended by his adult sons, and the children's books of Rumer Godden with his youngest. 

and, finally, 

He says he is slow, prone to distractions, and when asked why he did something often names a person or a favour ("I'm very big on loyalty, very big on friendship maybe").

Locked-in

I have been re-reading Jean-Dominique Bauby's wonderful The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. It is a book blinked one letter at a time by a man, Bauby, who suffered a massive stroke at a horribly young age, leaving him "locked-in". I won't spoil the book by summarising it; it's worth reading for the beautiful prose alone.

But, of course, it's more than that. It's a reminder of the dignity of the human being. When they discover what locked-in syndrome is, most students say they would rather be dead. After reading the book most of them change their mind.

There's also a great film of the book, which makes several significant changes. Some of the factual details - like the number of children Bauby had - are wrong but it's a powerful and moving movie nevertheless. I'd definitely watch it first before showing your students - there is a potentially controversial scene set in Lourdes, for example - but be warned: it's a film that makes quite an impact. Here's the trailer:

It's also worth pointing out that Bauby was not alone in finding dignity in terribly difficult circumstances. Gary Parkinson, who used to play football for Middlesborough, has continued working for the club since becoming locked-in. Here's what his son has to say about his father's condition.

Another pretty amazing guy is DJ EyeTech whose website is well worth working your way through. To read about the experiences of these men is a humbling and uplifting experience.

A Point of View

I keep catching the last few minutes of John Gray's A Point of View on BBC Radio 4. Today's broadcast was a fascinating discussion of the difference between Patricia Highsmith's (frankly terrifying) view of the world as expressed in her Tom Ripley books and Dostoevsky's view of the world as expressed in Crime and Punishment.

Gray is an atheist but what we might call a sympathetic atheist. Here's how he described his own relationship with religion in a Spectator interview:

I don’t belong to a religion. In fact I would have to be described as an atheist. But I’m friendly to religion on the grounds that it seems to me to be distinctively human, and it has produced many good things. But you see these humanists or rationalists who seem to hate this distinctively human feature. This to me seems to me very odd. These evangelical atheists say things such as: religion is like child abuse, that if you had no religious education, there would be no religion. It’s completely absurd. 

His discussion of Walter de la Mare and the limits of materialism was also very interesting. I don't agree with everything he says but his sympathy for religion and his sympathetic readings of literature certainly mean that he opens the way to an interesting debate.

The Way of Beauty

Another magazine which has some very interesting articles is Faith. The May and June edition, for example, has this fascinating article by James MacMillan in which he draw attention to the resources available here.

There's also an article by Dudley Plunkett on The Via Pulchritudinis: Beauty and the New Evangelisation which draws attention to this document from the Pontifical Council for Culture on The Via Pulchritudinis: Privileged Pathway for Evangelisation and Dialogue. There are lots of interesting passages but these two seemed of particular interest (though the translation isn't great for the first one):

To travel the way of beauty implies educating the youth for beauty, helping them develop a critical spirit to discern the various offerings of media culture, and aid them shape their senses and their character to grow and lead into true maturity. Is not "kitsch culture" only a typical outcry of those living in fear of responding to the call to undergo a profound transformation?

and,

It is a matter of presenting with a language that speaks and is pleasing to our contemporaries and using the most apt means the precious witness given by the Mother of God, the martyrs and the saints who have followed Christ in a particularly "attractive" manner. Much is being done in catechetical programmes to let the extraordinary lives of the saints be discovered. It is clear today that, for young people, saints are fascinating—think of Francis of Assisi and José of Anchieta, Juan Diego and Theresa of the Child Jesus, Rose of Lima and Bakhita, Kisito and Maria Goretti, Father Kolbe and Mother Theresa and the theatrical works, films, comic strips, recitals, concerts and muscials that re-create their stories. Their example calls each Christian to be a pilgrim on the pathway of beauty, truth, good, in journeying to the Celestial Jerusalem where we will contemplate the beauty of God in a relation full of love, face-to-face. "There, we will rest and we will see; we will see and we will love, we will love and we will praise. Such will be the end, without end."[40]

An appropriate education helps the faithful grow in the life of prayer of adoration and worship, and fuller participation in the truth to a liturgy lived in the fullness of beauty which immerses the faithful in the mystery of faith. At the same time as re-educating the faithful to marvel at the thinkgs that God works in our lives, it is also necessary to give back to the liturgy its true "splendour", all its dignity and authentic beauty, by rediscovering the authentic sense of Christian mystery, and forming the faithful so that they can enter into the meaning and beauty of the celebrated mystery and live it authentically.

Liturgy is not what man does, but is a divine work. The faithful need to be helped to perceive that the act of worship is not the fruit of activity, a product, a merit, a gain, but is the expression of a mystery, of something that cannot be entirely understood but that needs to be received rather than conceptualised. It is an act entirely free from considerations of efficiency. The attitude of the believer in the liturgy is marked by its capacity to receive, a condition of the progress of the spiritual life. This attitude is no longer spontaneous in a culture where rationalism seeks to direct everything, even our most intimate sentiments.

No less important is the promotion of sacred art to accompany aptly the celebration of the mysteries of the faith, to give beauty back to ecclesiastical buildings and liturgical objects. In this way they will be welcoming, and above all able to convey the authentic meaning of Christian liturgy and encourage full participation of the faithful in the divine mysteries, following the wish often expressed during the Synod of Bishops on the Eucharist.

Certainly the churches must be aesthetically beautiful and well decorated, the liturgies accompanied by beautiful chants and good music, the celebrations dignified and preaching well prepared, but it is not this in itself which is the via pulchritudinis or that which changes us. These are just conditions that facilitate the action of the grace of God. Therefore the faithful need to be educated to pay attention not merely to the aesthetic dimension of the liturgy, however beautiful it may be, but also to understand that the Litrugy is a divine act that is not determined by an ambiance, a climate or even by rubrics, for it is the mystery of faith celebrated in Church.

Waugh, Wine and Brideshead Revisited

Arguably the most interesting magazine currently being published in the UK is Standpoint. April's edition, which I'm still working my way through, was particularly fascinating. I won't go through the main articles but just want to draw attention to one piece that is tucked away at the end of the magazine.

It's an article about the use of wine in Brideshead Revisited, an apparently insignificant topic that reveals quite a lot about Waugh and his great novel. Though the article's anonymous author doesn't quite spell out the link with the Eucharist, it is clear that wine has a sacramental value in the novel that takes us far beyond mere social commentary. There's a great deal to mull over here, perhaps with glass in hand.

May

This what I wrote last year about May being Mary's month - apparently we had terrible weather then as well. So, what could be better than another Marian poem from Gerard Manley Hopkins this year?

                                                The May Magnificat

MAY is Mary’s month, and I
Muse at that and wonder why:
Her feasts follow reason,
Dated due to season—
Candlemas, Lady Day;
But the Lady Month, May,
Why fasten that upon her,
With a feasting in her honour?
Is it only its being brighter
Than the most are must delight her?
Is it opportunest
And flowers finds soonest?
Ask of her, the mighty mother:
Her reply puts this other
Question: What is Spring?—
Growth in every thing—
Flesh and fleece, fur and feather,
Grass and greenworld all together;
Star-eyed strawberry-breasted
Throstle above her nested
Cluster of bugle blue eggs thin
Forms and warms the life within;
And bird and blossom swell
In sod or sheath or shell.
All things rising, all things sizing
Mary sees, sympathising
With that world of good,
Nature’s motherhood.
Their magnifying of each its kind
With delight calls to mind
How she did in her stored
Magnify the Lord.
Well but there was more than this:
Spring’s universal bliss
Much, had much to say
To offering Mary May.
When drop-of-blood-and-foam-dapple
Bloom lights the orchard-apple
And thicket and thorp are merry
With silver-surfèd cherry
And azuring-over greybell makes
Wood banks and brakes wash wet like lakes
And magic cuckoocall
Caps, clears, and clinches all—
This ecstasy all through mothering earth
Tells Mary her mirth till Christ’s birth
To remember and exultation
In God who was her salvation.

Dialogues des Carmelites

On Saturday BBC Radio 3 is broadcasting Poulenc's Dialogues des Carmelites live from the Met. I'm sure it's going to be great. But I'm also interested in the literary back story. Poulenc was inspired by Georges Bernanos's play, which was itself originally written as a screenplay, which was itself inspired by Gertrude von Le Fort's The Song at the Scaffold.

I'm a little busy at the moment - hence the lack of recent posts - and so haven't time to discuss the different versions properly but if you've got access to JSTOR, this article has an interesting discussion of Bernanos's version of the story in particular.

Suffice it to say, when one of the great (Catholic) composers of the 20th Century meets one of the great (Catholic) writers you have a recipe for success.

Shakespeare and the Catholic Question

There has been renewed interest in Shakespeare and Catholicism in recent years. Particularly honourable mention ought to go to Dr Alison Shell of University College, London, Manchester University Press, which has brought out a number of interesting books, and Dr Thomas Rist. 

However, despite this surge of interest in the academy, there is still a sense in which the debate is only just beginning to get going, which is why this new book, due out in June, looks so interesting. Here's the publisher's blurb:

"Why does Catholicism have such an imaginative hold on Shakespearean drama, even though the on-going Reformation outlawed its practice? Shakespeare's Unreformed Fictions contends that the answers to this question are theatrical rather than strictly theological. Avoiding biographical speculation, this book concentrates on dramatic impact, and thoroughly integrates new literary analysis with fresh historical research. In exploring the dramaturgical variety of the 'Catholic' content of Shakespeare's plays, Gillian Woods argues that habits, idioms, images, and ideas lose their denominational clarity when translated into dramatic fiction: they are awkwardly 'unreformed' rather than doctrinally Catholic. Providing nuanced readings of generically diverse plays, this book emphasises the creative function of such unreformed material, which Shakespeare uses to pose questions about the relationship between self and other. A wealth of contextual evidence is studied, including catechisms, homilies, religious polemics, news quartos, and non-Shakespearean drama, to highlight how early modern Catholicism variously provoked nostalgia, faith, conversion, humour, fear, and hatred. This book argues that Shakespeare exploits these contradictory attitudes to frame ethical problems, creating fictional plays that consciously engage audiences in the difficult leaps of faith required by both theatre and theology. By recognizing the playfulness of Shakespeare's unreformed fictions, this book offers a different perspective on the interactions between post-Reformation religion and the theatre, and an alternative angle on Shakespeare's interrogation of the scope of dramatic fiction."

It's difficult to tell before seeing the book of course, but that sounds to me like a very interesting thesis.

Hemingway and the Catholic Question

I've written about Hemingway a few times before (see here [on 47 endings], here [on his Catholicism], here [in relation to Cormac McCarthy], here [on writing], here [on Farewell to Arms], and here [on Pilgrimage]) so I'm delighted to have been told in the combox about a new book on Hemingway's Catholicism.

The really good news is that it's affordable (especially the Kindle version) and comes highly recommended by H. R. Stoneback, doyen of Hemingway scholars.

Xavier's Legacies

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. 

Oxford Tolkien Spring School

Here's a conference that looks great: lectures on Tolkien from experts in Oxford University, where he lived and worked for so many years.

Two interesting articles

There have been two interesting articles recently about faith in fiction. The first one, by Paul Elie in The New York Times, raises lots of questions and draws attention to a few books that are certainly worth reading.

The second, which is also fascinating, is a response by Gregory Wolfe in The Wall Street Journal.

Though both authors make valuable points, they also both focus on Anglophone (and mainly American) literature. That's fine up to a point but, I would argue, the picture looks very different if you widen the lens: Torgny Lindgren, Kyung Sook-Shin, Roger Bichelberger, Fan Wen, Uwem Akpan, Martin Mosebach ...

And that's just a few of the Catholics.

The Catholic Herald & Contemporary Chinese Literature

I have an article in this week's Catholic Herald about Christianity and contemporary Chinese literature in which I argue that Christianity not only had a powerful impact on 20th Century Chinese literature but also that this fascination with Christianity, and often specifically with Catholicism, has continued into the 21st century. 

In recent years several writers, including Liu Enming, Yiwen and Su Liqun, have written novels about Jesuit missionaries to China, while Hua Zi’s biography of Mother Teresa, Walking in Love, is not only a bestseller but is now required reading in schools from Shanghai to Guangdong.

There are a number of literary converts working in China too. One of the leading figures of the Chinese avant-garde, Bei Cun, converted in 1992 and has since written a number of novels in which his Protestant faith looms large. Another convert from atheism, this time to Catholicism, is Fan Wen, about whom I have blogged before.

I also write about movies such as The Flowers of War, Back to 1942, and If You Are the One in order to make the point that what we see in contemporary Chinese literature and film is not rampant anti-Catholicism but something much more complex and nuanced. The position taken by individual writers varies enormously, but overall there is a fascination with religion in general and Christianity in particular that might surprise many readers in the West.

This is not to suggest that the Church in China has no problems, but what Chinese literature can show us is that the situation is neither as simple nor as bleak as an examination of Church politics might lead us to believe.

And the good news is that there is still more to come. We only need to look at South Korea to see what potential is unrealised in China. If Claudia Lee Hae-in, a Korean Benedictine nun, can sell more than two million copies of her most recent poetry collection and if Kyung-Sook Shin, another Catholic author, can win the Man Asia Literary Prize and sell over two million copies of her novel, Please Look After Mother, what sort of impact might Chinese Catholic writers still be able to make on world literature?

Epiphany

I've been rather busy with other things recently and so haven't been blogging but it's now time to resume, albeit briefly.

Epiphany often gets missed by schools in the post-Christmas haze so what about a poem or a graphic novel which links the Chinese classic, Journey to the West, with the story of the Magi?

The Anglo-Saxons

BBC Radio 3 have started broadcasting a new series of 15-minute essays on the Anglo-Saxons, including such key figures as St Cuthbert, St Augustine, and Hild of Whitby.

You can read an introductory essay here and can download the series from iTunes and elsewhere.

Mo Yan and the Nobel Prize

There might well be room for debate about this year's recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize but I reckon Mo Yan fully deserved the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Ever since the death of Shen Congwen, China has lacked a serious contender for the prize, mainly because Chinese literature had such a desperate time between 1949 and the late 1970s. During the Cultural Revolution a mere 12 novels were published per year on average but, even before then, Chinese fiction suffered terribly. However, when China began to open up in the late '70s and early '80s, there was also a renaissance of Chinese writing and the greatest author to have emerged at that time was Mo Yan.

(And no, I haven't forgotten Gao Xingjian, who won the Nobel Prize in 2000. I suspect it came as as much of a surprise to him as to followers of Chinese literature both inside and out of the country.)

Arguably Mo Yan's greatest novel was one of his first, Red Sorghum, a great war novel which, like J.G. Ballard's Empire of the Sun, redefines the very way in which we see the Second World War. For a start it reminds us that there was more to the war than what happened in Europe between 1939 and 1945. More significantly, it also challenged Maoist versions of Chinese history, which is why it was originally published by the Liberation Army Publishing House with some rather significant cuts.

I haven't got space here to give a full book review but it's certainly worth a read, though you'd have to tread carefully before teaching it to school children.

Mo Yan often raises deals with topics which are of great interest to Catholics even if the way in which he deals with such topics is often far from Catholic. For example, from as early as his 1986 short story, 'Abandoned Child', through to later works such as the often savagely surreal The Republic of Wine and Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out (perhaps the most readable of his later works), he examines the place of children in modern China, showing a specific interest in children, child abandonment, and adoption.

Another common approach in his work is the use of an unconventional family history to challenge conventional Chinese political history. Sadly, he has not always escaped religious prejudice in his attempt to challenge political prejudices. In Big Breasts and Wide Hips, for example, one of the main characters develops a bizarre breast fixation that stunts his emotional growth into adulthood partly because he is the illegitimate son of a cowardly Christian (and possibly Catholic) missionary priest.

Mo Yan's work is challenging in many ways but he's clearly a highly significant author from a country which is going to become culturally as well as politically and economically more important as the century progresses. We in the West need to engage with works like his.

So let's finish, slightly flippantly, with a view from China: it's a real sign of the times when the People's Daily seems to be more interested in how much money Mo Yan is going to make from winning the prize than in his cultural value.

Lord Alton on Tolkien

I have just come across a talk given by Lord Alton last year on Tolkien's faith, life and work. It's only a basic introduction but basic introductions are sometimes what is needed.

What's particularly useful is that David Alton offers not only the transcript of his talk but also the accompanying PowerPoint presentation and an audio recording.

Unapologetic

The Theos website has an interesting review of Francis Spufford's latest book. I greatly enjoyed The Child that Books Built but was a little surprised to see the subject matter of Spufford's latest book.

I can't say that the title greatly inspires me - the fact that Christianity still makes emotional sense is neither surprising nor a great basis for belief in my view - but the book certainly sounds intriguing and worth a read even so.

Hemingway's 47 Endings

A new edition of Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms has just been published. What makes this particular edition a must-have for admirers of Hemingway's work is the inclusion of the 47 alternative endings the author came up with. I, for one, find it tremendously reassuring that a great author like Hemingway should have had so much difficulty (and taken so much care) over his novel's final words.

To hear some of these other endings and an interview with Seán Hemingway, the author's grandson, click here.

Newman, Hopkins, the Saints and Literature

It has been quite a fortnight for saints with a literary connection.

Today is the Memorial of Blessed John Henry Newman, the only novelist (I think) to have been recognised as a saint (see here, here, here and here for my earlier thoughts on Newman). Not that his work as a novelist (any more than St Thomas More's work as a writer) was what led to him being beatified.

Newman was an inspirational figure in all sorts of ways even during his own lifetime as I was reminded when I was in the Church of St Aloysius Gonzaga in Oxford this weekend, because not only did Newman preach there but it was also where Gerard Manley Hopkins, who was received into the Church by Newman, was a curate (see also here).

In recent days we have remembered St Francis of Assisi (4th October) about whom the novelist Julien Green (among many others) has written, Blessed Columba Marmion (3rd October) whose Christ in His Mysteries (available here for free in French and here for a price in English translation) inspired Messiaen's Vingt regards sur l'enfant Jesus, and the Holy Guardian Angels (2nd October), whom I mentioned the other day. And that's without even starting on those great writers: St Therese of the Child Jesus and St Jerome.

I should also mention Henry Garnett's The Blood Red Crescent and the Battle of Lepanto in connection with the Memorial of Our Lady of the Rosary last Sunday.

That should keep us going for a while.

Fr Tim Finigan on Evelyn Waugh's 'Vile Bodies'

As so often, Fr Tim Finigan has an amusing and informative post on his blog, this time on Evelyn Waugh's Vile Bodies.

This Week's Catholic Herald

This week's Catholic Herald is definitely worth getting hold of. There is a fascinating interview with Walter Hooper, C.S. Lewis's personal assistant in the last months of the writer's life, and a good article on Jack Kerouac's rather tortured Catholicism.

However, that's not all. There's a great article by Edward Norman on why he has converted to Catholicism and an interesting series of articles on the documents of Vatican II.

Good to Read

One website that's good to read is goodtoread.org, a parent's guide to children's books. Here is part of what the site's creator says about his approach:

Why another site about children's books? One answer to this is easy: you can't have too much of a good thing. Why have more than one sweet shop on the High Street? They all sell much the same things at much the same price, but perhaps you find the people in this one easier, or the display in that one more appealing. There are many websites that give information about children's books, and there are many people with different tastes in websites.

On another level, this website offers a slightly different approach from the majority: it doesn't assume that a well-structured book with a good spread of vocabulary and a certain depth of subject matter is unquestionably a book any child should read. At goodtoread.org we believe that children and young people can benefit from some guidance as to their reading. This may mean recommending a book especially or discouraging a certain book or author on account of the poverty of style or unsuitability of the subject matter. Especially when a series is popular or often recommended, it might mean going over the subjects presented in the book with your child to make sure the youngster has benefitted from it and not been harmed.

To read the whole page (and it's a page worth reading), click here.

All this sounds very good but the test is what happens in practice. A useful test case might be what goodtoread.org makes of Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy so here's the link.

That seems to me to be a very fair-minded, balanced and honest appraisal from a thoughtful Catholic so I'd heartily recommend the rest of the website.

La Porte des Anges

I was going to save this post for a little while but given that Saturday was the Feast Day of Saints Michael, Gabriel and Raphael, Archangels, yesterday was the Feast Day of St Therese of the Child Jesus, and today is the Feast Day of the Holy Guardian Angels, it seemed appropriate to post it now.

La Porte des Anges is a wonderful French language series of fantasy novels for children of 12 upwards. Le Complot d'Ephese starts with a 15 year old boy, Jean-Baptiste, unxpectedly witnessing a fight between the Archangel Michael and a demon in his back garden. They are fighting over a boy (who turns out to be Eutychus, the boy who fell asleep and out of the window while listening to St Paul) and, when interrupted by Jean-Baptiste, drop an old nail, which turns out to be not only one of the nails that held Jesus to the cross but a key to la porte des anges.   

It's action-packed, fast moving, often funny, and jam packed with angels; I'll post a full review when I've got to the end.

What is fascinating is that this sort of book should exist at all. The author draws upon a range of sources to develop his Catholic fantasy novels and has clearly made a big impact in France. These books, as one reviewer on amazon.fr puts it, are "mieux qu'Harry Potter". And the first volume is also now available as a graphic novel. Let's hope for an English translation before too long.

But what about St Therese? Let's just say that Michael Dor is not the author's real name and that you can discover more about his background from this site. 

An Unusual Patron Saint of Lost Causes

A few days ago it was the Hail Mary pass, now it's "Seve Ballesteros, the patron saint of lost causes". At least that's what Iain Carter, the BBC's Golf Correspondent reckons. 

So what's going on here? Sport seems to be bringing out the religious (or pseudo-religious) in people this year in all sorts of different ways. I suspect calling Seve the patron saint of lost causes is just a throwaway comment but it's tempting to see it as something more: a residual belief in the efficacy of praying to saints or, even more interestingly, a new influence to Britain coming from Catholic countries like Spain. 

And it's not just golf. Now that so many footballers cross themselves when coming onto the pitch it's almost as if Henry VIII never broke with England's thousand-year Catholic past. Almost.

The Hail Mary Pass

The BBC (online) Magazine has had some really interesting English Language articles recently, including this one on 'Britishisms and the Britishisation of American English'. 

However, it wasn't until I read this article on 'The shared language of politics and sport' that I came across the Hail Mary pass, which probably says more about my British parochialism than about the prevalence of the term. For fellow Brits, a Hail Mary pass is a long forward pass made in the closing stages of an American Football game. Chuck it - say a Hail Mary - hope someone catches it in the end zone. That's the basic idea.

"Stepping up to the plate" has become something of a cliche in British political discourse. Somehow I can't see the Hail Mary pass catching on in the same way.   

Hobbitus Ille

Fr Tim Finigan has a welcome reminder of the lure of The Hobbit on his blog today. He also provides a useful link to this tremendously interesting page from the New Liturgical Movement on Tolkien’s liturgical views.

However, what made me chuckle was the link in the Com Box to the new Latin translation of The Hobbit and, especially, the learned discussion of the finer points of translation in the Amazon reviews.

It reminded me of one of my tutors at university. A learned but rather eccentric man, he gave his young son Asterix books to read. This rather surprised us until we heard that it was Asterix translated into Latin.

Chinese Catholic Literature Then and Now

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?