Monsieur Ouine

Monsieur Ouine is a 1943 novel by the French writer Georges Bernanos. It tells the story of a retired teacher who settles in a village in northern France, where he becomes surrounded by mysterious deaths and other unexplained events. The book was published in English in 1945 as The Open Mind, translated by Geoffrey Dunlop.[1] A new translation by William Bush was published in 2000 under the original French title.[2]

Monsieur Ouine
First English-language edition
AuthorGeorges Bernanos
TranslatorGeoffrey Dunlop
CountryBrazil
LanguageFrench
PublisherAtlantica Editora
Publication date
1943
Published in English
1945 (Bodley Head
Pages314

Composition

Monsieur Ouine has its origin in a spiritual crisis Bernanos went through in the early 1930s, when he contemplated how nihilism and despair lead to evil. The book took nine years to write and the author considered it to be his most ambitious work. The plot is purposely ambiguous and in certain parts inconsistent, as Bernanos considered evil to be unstable and wanted the novel to reflect this.[3]

Reception

Kirkus Reviews wrote in 2000: "This is a savage morality tale that depicts the dying of the landed aristocracy and a wartorn civilization's larger 'innocence' with sharp imagery, precise characterizations, and commanding intensity. All of Bernanos's fiction ought to be available in English translation, and William Bush looks like the right man for the job."[4]

References
  1. "The open mind". WorldCat. Retrieved 2015-10-03.
  2. "Monsieur Ouine". WorldCat. Retrieved 2015-08-24.
  3. Field, Frank (1975). Three French Writers and the Great War. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. p. 186. ISBN 0-521-20916-1.
  4. "Monsieur Ouine". Kirkus Reviews. Retrieved 2015-08-24.
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