Book Review: The Diary of a Country Priest, by George Bernanos (1936)

This is considered one of the best French novels of the 20th century.

The unnamed diarist, a young priest filled with zeal, is assigned to a tiny church in rural France. The congregation is cynical and apathetic toward him, the church, and Christianity.  Many of the people he interacts with are hostile or insulting. He is morally scrupulous and is quick to accuse others of pride or blasphemy, which personally offends him.

Significantly, he is emaciated from an illness which he begins to fear might be tuberculosis. The symptoms are that he cannot eat or drink most foods without stomach pain. At least initially, it does not interfere with his job as a pastor. He doesn’t know it yet, but he has stomach cancer, and it will soon kill him.

In the seminary, he was a brilliant student, but people saw him as a poet and a dreamer, qualities not considered desirable in a priest. He explains that men from the better social classes end up in the monasteries, but priests like him, from peasant backgrounds, become Diocesan priests and are assigned to churches in the hinterlands. He is quite poor and relies partly on donated food and drink. His clothes are stained and patched.

As an inexperienced priest, he often seeks advice from a more senior priest at a neighboring church with whom he shares his frustrations. The advisor is more critical than supportive, including of his sickly appearance. He tells him his black coat makes him look like a German romantic poet, that he should start eating steaks, and try to put some weight on his frame. Our young priest can’t eat most solid foods because they cause stomach pain, but he never mentions this to his advisor. Wine is one of the few things he can drink, and combined with his gaunt and disheveled appearance, his parishioners think he is an alcoholic. They revile and ridicule him behind his back.

The young priest ruminates constantly over his inability to have a positive effect on anyone in the community. To make matters worse, his clerical superiors lecture him on the proper attitudes and behaviors when dealing with his flock.

At the midpoint of the narrative, the rebellious and insolent daughter from the chateau next door to the church approached the priest about a troubling situation regarding her father. The young priest needed to call on the chateau anyway, to discuss some trivial matter, and he used it as a pretext to speak with the girl’s mother, the contessa. It becomes an extended, dramatic, and confrontational scene between the two. The contessa is intensely angry and bitter, with no use for God, the church, or this young priest. She condescends, insults, and berates him. She tells the priest that she has no relationship with her long-spoiled, overly entitled daughter, that for years, her husband has been sleeping with every servant girl around, and worst of all, she had a son who died as a child and cannot get over his death.

Their exchange is not like that between a priest and a penitent in the confessional. Nor is it like she made an appointment to vent to a counselor. It is more like two knights who meet by chance in an open field and engage in combat. However, she does vent from the deepest emotional pain, and he does listen deeply and with the utmost compassion. With every expression of anger, every bitter utterance, in the face of insults being hurled at him, our young priest responds with a kind of verbal aikido. He takes each of her expressions of despair and turns them back onto her, but reframes them in a different way of looking at her situation, an alternate Christian message of hope. And in the end, it works. The remainder of the story is an equally dynamic and cascading series of extraordinary exchanges and epiphanies among the various characters.

As a reader who doesn’t know the French language or culture, the titles, names, and abbreviations were slightly challenging. Like some other readers, it took more than one attempt to get into the book, and then I read the novel twice to make sure I understood it. Some of the commentary and dialogue seem rather mindless or even abstract, and I wonder if they simply reflect the social pretensions of the time. In any event, the priest character was a saint. Outwardly, he did his job conscientiously, while inwardly, he was always humble and virtuous, always trying to do the right thing as a priest. Consumed with self-doubt and feelings of inferiority as a parish priest, he was nevertheless a conduit of grace to others. You may have to read the novel to understand this, but the dying words of our young priest are, “Grace is everywhere.”

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Book Review: Holy Moments, by Matthew Kelly

 Given that the ease of access to social media has enabled reviewers to condemn and reject things they do not understand, I am not shocked at how many have trashed this book. The world is in a pandemic of meaninglessness and hopelessness. The book is nothing more than an exhortation to act with Christian virtue, no matter how small the situation, for the sake of transforming the grassroots of society and thereby making the world a better place. Think of the Butterfly Effect: a single act of kindness (or love, charity, thoughtfulness, etc.) can change another for the better and start a chain reaction of more acts of kindness, some of which may magnify and have an even greater impact on others, which the originator never imagined. And you don't have to be Christian or of any faith to do so.  I know atheists who already believe in holy moments (though not necessarily by that name) more than many self-described Christians. We need people to understand that every virtuous act, however small, contributes to making a happier, just, and peaceful world.

Book Review: The Sign of Jonas, by Thomas Merton (1953)

A man driven to find God, Thomas Merton was a Trappist monk who entered Gethsemani Abbey in Kentucky in 1941. This journal recorded his thoughts and reflections from 1946, when he made his solemn profession of vows, to 1951, on prayer, silence, contemplation, writing, the Sacraments, and other Catholic rituals. During this period, he published his conversion story, The Seven Story Mountain, was ordained as a priest, and became a U.S. citizen. He also wrote or published Waters of Silo, New Seeds of Contemplations, and The Ascent to Truth. Toward the end of the journal, he emerges as a more senior monk and becomes responsible for the education of junior members of the monastery, as Master of Scholastics.

One reads Merton for his insights, wisdom, beautiful rhetoric, and poetic imagery. As with all journals, the author's entries hop abruptly from one haphazard subject to another and can make for a bumpy reading experience. As in many of his books, he comments on the Benedictine charism and monastic life, from both an experiential and an intellectual perspective. Along the way, he comments on various spiritual books of others and his desire to be a saint. He loves his life in the monastery and cites few struggles. With the enthusiasm of a convert, he can be scrupulous, prideful, or extreme in places.

The monastery grounds occupy 2,600 acres, with knolls, valleys, groupings of trees, a pond, and all the birds, bugs, and animals one would expect. It is also a working farm, with all of the barns and farming equipment to go along with it. Merton was the monastery’s forester and planted tens of thousands of trees. He knew all the different, local species of trees and how to cut, plant, and nurture them. Just think: the trees he planted would be about 75 years old today–huge, mature trees. I liked how Merton distinguished different species of birds by their songs. As one might expect from a contemplative, his observations of nature are subtle, and his descriptions of nature are beautiful and poetic, in a way that honors their creator.

Comically, when Merton submitted a draft of The Seven Story Mountain to the order’s censors, they rejected it while telling him he should take a correspondence course in English grammar. I say “comically” because he is one of the great writers of the 20th century, having published about 75 volumes of prose and a dozen volumes of poetry. The censor also scolded him for revealing too much of his not-so-saintly life before entering the monastery (this was the early 1950s). Rather than giving up or getting angry, Merton chose to view it as a challenge. Long after Merton’s death, it became known publicly that he had fathered a child out of wedlock in England, before entering religious life. In the journal, he subtly hints at this when he expresses a desire to maintain his spiritual virginity.

The title alludes to the quote from Jesus, “no sign will be given it except the sign of Jonah the prophet” (Mt 12:39), a reference to The Book of Jonah. In both the book’s brief epigraph and the lengthy, beautifully soaring meditation which is the epilogue, Merton cites the story of the reluctant prophet Jonah, swallowed by a whale, but then regurgitated, as representative of how he sees himself and his role as a monk, as both a prophet and one of the repentant men of Nineveh.

Book Review: The Women, by Hannah Kristin (2024)

 I just read Hannah Kristin's novel The Women. It is the story of a young nurse, less than a year out of nursing school, who enlists in the Army during the Vietnam War and spends two years working in evacuation hospitals in combat zones. The book is intended to illustrate the experiences of nurses during the war. It is a page-turner, and the author does an excellent job of showing the inner life of nurse Frances McGrath. 

PTSD afflicted nurses at the same rate as the male veterans.  Ten thousand women served in the military in Vietnam, and most were nurses. Their average was 23, and the average age of the soldiers they treated was 19.  Every day, six days a week, in-country, they worked 12-hour shifts, treating young American men whose limbs had been blown off, whose intestines were hanging out, or otherwise maimed horribly.  As if that were not enough, the Vietcong regularly attacked the hospitals and nurses' living quarters with rockets and mortar rounds.  

  

The public treated returning nurses the same way they treated returning soldiers.  They were not respected. No one wanted to know what they did, saw, or heard.  They were told to forget about it (as were the men). Parents assumed their daughters were the same naive and innocent persons who had left and expected them to resume their lives as if they had never been in the war. Most doctors, as well as the public, had never heard of PTSD.  Some civilians refused to believe that women served in the war.  And once people became aware of veterans with PTSD, because they served in hospitals and were not deployed in direct combat, many refused to believe that nurses could have PTSD.

For developing nursing skills, the quality of experience in a field hospital cannot be matched elsewhere. Nurses routinely performed many things only doctors did in the U.S.A. (e.g., tracheotomies and suturing patients after abdominal surgeries).  When they left the military, they were confident they could handle anything in the civilian world.

The book's historical and social background is accurate. It covers Frankie’s time in Vietnam and return to the U.S.A., which is equally important to understand.  I appreciated being reminded of the anti-war and civil rights movements and the other fashions, trends, and social changes from the 1960s.

The author did extensive background research before writing the book. Her purpose was to present the experiences of nurses in the war. She included examples of every kind of thing that happened to veterans during the period, but how many veterans experienced all of these things?  After Frankie returns to the U.S.A., some events are suspenseful and entertaining but excessive and overly dramatic. But overall, the book is a damn good read.

A Book Review: Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1958), by Truman Capote

 On first impression, Holly Golightly seems shallow and scatterbrained.  While she says things that are sharp, intelligent, and full of life, they don’t seem to follow any expected or logical pattern.  She lives in a brownstone apartment in Manhattan, on East 70th Street by Lexington Avenue, and her main antagonist and foil is the unnamed first-person narrator who lives in the apartment above her. Capote presents an idyllic ambiance of 1940s New York–Tiffany’s, landmark hotels, spacious apartments, and upscale neighborhood bars with the characters speaking in the euphemisms and vernacular of the period.

Holly is 19 and comes from a broken family in Arkansas. At fourteen, she married a widower, a middle-aged veterinarian from Texas, but ran away.  The beautiful Holly connects with well-off or influential men from every walk of life, age, and country of origin, but she always does something to make them flee.  But even after condemning and rejecting her, some part of each man still loves her and will help her if needed. 

For a while, the narrator takes Holly and her antics at face value, that is, without judgment or emotional reaction, until he gets fed up, snaps, and decides she is “a crude exhibitionist, a time waster, an utter fake: someone never to be spoken to again.”  Of course, like all the others. When he eventually gets over it, he too realizes he loves her.

Holly dreams of marrying a wealthy man with whom she will have many children. In describing how she copes with romantic failures, she says:  “Well, when I get it the only thing that does any good is to jump in a cab and go to Tiffany's. Calms me down right away. The quietness and the proud look of it; nothing very bad could happen to you there.  If I could find a real-life place that'd make me feel like Tiffany's, then - then I'd buy some furniture and give the cat a name!”  

She knows or quickly learns who and what she does not want in life; however, she isn’t stable or unconflicted enough to constructively pursue what she does want.  Having been on her own since childhood has forced her to develop a creative wit and certain behaviors as survival skills, but the same behaviors ruin every relationship.

In the narrative, note the recurrence of the image of a cage.  To one suitor, she says:  “You mustn't give your heart to a wild thing. The more you do, the stronger they get, until they're strong enough to run into the woods or fly into a tree. And then to a higher tree and then to the sky.”   Despite being desired by wealthy or powerful men, Holly does not want to be put in a cage.  Near the end, one of her male acquaintances, the mobster Sally Tomato opines, “Yes, she was a phony but a real phony.”  She is real for sure but destined to repeat the same behaviors over and over again.  

Capote’s light and easy style, plus endearing imagery, made this an enjoyable read.   The novel is a character study supported by a great setting, storyline, and narrative voice.  Holly’s dialogue made it the perfect subject for the movie and stage adaptations. Knowing it was famous, I tried to watch the movie once but found it boring and couldn’t follow it. However, now that I have read the book, I will try it again. 

Reading Habits

 When I was a child, my mother did not allow me to have comic books.  I had neighborhood friends who read comic books. Their parents bought them or gave them the money to buy.  Not my mother.  She did not consider them edifying. To her, they had no redeeming value.  She inherited this attitude from my grandfather.  Yet my mother never applied the not-edifying rule to watching cartoons or Superman on TV. 

Just as inconsistent, despite the sanction on comic books, my father always enjoyed reading “The Funny Papers” that came with almost every newspaper.  (What was my mother going to say to my father?)  Every Sunday after Mass, my parents bought the Sunday editions of the New York Times and the New York Daily News. The New York Times never had “funny papers,”  but the Daily News did, and their Sunday edition had a whole section for comics that I looked forward to reading, as did my father.  They had Dick Tracey, Joe Palooka, Li’l Abner, Little Orphan Annie, and everything else on down.

Being deprived of the pleasures of comic books, I was also never allowed to read science fiction for similar reasons. More to the point, I never knew it existed.  When my grandfather and mother were growing up, science fiction was generally considered pulp, that is, junk fiction.  O.K.--I get that.  However, on one visit to my grandparents’ house, on their small bookshelf, I discovered a book called 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and a few other novels by Jules Verne. I sat on the living room rug and read 20,000 Leagues until it was time to go home. It was utterly fascinating.   

My grandfather also had a beautiful edition of Moby Dick, which I read cover-to-cover when I was 12.  He also had Silent Spring by Rachel Carson, which is on my bucket list to read. My grandfather also subscribed to Reader’s Digest, which I devoured. They used to have a section called “It Pays To Increase Your Word Power,” a vocabulary quiz. I did all the vocabulary quizzes, but my grandfather always got a perfect score.  He also had Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island and Daniel Defoe’s The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe on his bookshelf, which I also read.

I was never introduced to the literary genre of fantasy. Again, I was unaware that it existed. Nevertheless, like the paradox of comic books vs the funny papers and TV cartoons, my mother would plop me down in front of the TV every year to watch The Wizard of Oz.   

In high school, we read some John Steinbeck and Nathaniel Hawthorne, not to mention Edgar Allen Poe, Saki, Jack London, etc.--the usual adolescent boy stuff.  As an adolescent, on my own, I read every book I could get by Herman Hesse.   I started with Beneath the Wheel, then Damien, then about half a dozen others. My favorite novel is Hesse’s Steppenwolf.  I tried re-reading some of Hesse’s books in midlife and found they no longer resonated with me.  Se la vie. You have to read him in adolescence.

At some point in my life, I heard of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings Trilogy.  I knew they were popular among young people during the time I was in college, as were the books of Carlos Castenada, but I never ventured to read them. I only discovered The Narnia Chronicles after my two sons were born.  When my children were old enough to read, I asked my mother why she had never introduced us to the stories of C.S. Lewis or J.R. Tolkien. She shrugged and said she didn’t know.  I interpreted that to mean she never had an inkling that they existed or were exceptional. (Sorry, I couldn’t help the pun!).

Years later, my mother and father did watch the movie adaptions of The Lord of the Rings.   My mother always expressed awe for the creativity of great books and movies, including the movie adaptions of The Lord of the Rings once they came out, as she did for The Wizard of Oz from decades prior.

Of course, I haphazardly read many other books (Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance anyone?), including biographies and memoirs by various sports heroes (Instant Replay, for example), plus things like The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat.     

In my twenties, I read every book by Thomas Merton (a Trappist Monk) I could find. A gifted spiritual writer, he was and is inspirational.  His essays on social justice, about the social justice movements of the 1960s, are exceptional but a little dated now. 

As a young adult, I discovered Louis L’Amour, a wonderful and entertaining author famous for writing (well-researched!) pulp fiction novels about the Old West.  Moreover, in a college literature class, I was introduced to the hard-boiled detective novel, which was also once relegated to the pulp, that is, junk literature category.  Somewhere in my young adulthood, I read A Confederacy of Dunces (not pulp fiction!), a unique and under-appreciated book. 

Today, I read a lot of nonfiction, especially American History, biography, autobiography, select religious or philosophical books, and the Bible. I rarely read self-help books. I will read memoirs of pop/rock stars (like Testimony, by Robbie Robertson) and movie stars (Madonna).

I like any good fiction.  If I were to imagine someone suddenly asking me to name a novel I have read, I would say The Life of Pi, because it’s different. I like style,  imagery, and a good narrative.  I’ll try any author, but I still don’t read science fiction or fantasy.  I tried reading The Hobbit and found it boring. I love a good detective novel, police procedural, or spy novel. So-called post-modern literature requires too much mental calistenics.  I love early-American literature–Washington Irving, James Fenimore Cooper, Edgar Allen Poe, and Nathaniel Hawthorne.  

I know there is a “Shit-ton” of excellent, literary women writers out there.  I just haven’t bothered to read any of them. I generally don’t read mid-listers.  I don’t bother reading horror, pure thrillers, or best-selling pot-boilers (Stephen King, James Patterson, John Grisham).  Though there are exceptions, they tend to be all form and no substance.  I prefer books with genuine human drama, existential dilemmas, exciting adventure, or unique writing style.  My grandfather would approve.

Words of Remembrance - Nicholas Sagliano, PhD (May 16, 1955 - Dec 1, 2022)

Nick and I first met at Cypress Road School, on the first day of kindergarten.  I was crying and miserable with homesickness.  Or teacher, Mrs. Miles gave up trying to console me and sat me down at a table.  A boy sat across from me putting together a wooden puzzle.  He told me his name was Nicholas.  He was not crying or upset, and I consoled myself by watching Nicholas calmly assemble that puzzle with confident, methodical resolve.   

At Sacred Heart grammar school, I had no idea what Nick’s grades were–I assume they were mostly ‘A’s.  But about seventh grade, a rumor spread that Nick had read the entire Encyclopedia Brittanica. The Sisters must have told Fr. Joyce because he came into our class with a goofy smile, asked where Nick was, and exclaimed to the class, “He read the whole encyclopedia!”  On the bus ride home, Nick volunteered to me that he had not read the entire encyclopedia, only a couple of sections. To his credit, I never, ever heard Nick brag, gloat, or try to take credit for something he didn’t do.  

By the eighth grade, Nick knew he wanted to become a chemist, a career choice he pursued with the same single-minded resolve with which he put that puzzle together in kindergarten.

From our class at Sacred Heart, eight of us went to Don Bosco Prep, including Nick, and in hindsight, we were a pretty smart bunch of guys.  Nick knew he was smart.  Once, while coming home on the bus, something possessed Nick to estimate each of our IQs.  He estimated his own IQ as very high, and I remember this because he ranked me about 10 or 15 points below himself.  I didn’t take offense, I just never forgot.  Characteristically, Nick did not rate himself as having the highest IQ.

Nick commuted to Manhattan college driving a Dodge Dart.  One day over lunch, at the McDonald’s on Hemion Road, Nick told me that his car had suffered a blown engine, and the cost of a new engine or to repair the old one was more than the car was worth.  Solely for the purpose of dramatic irony, I told Nick that, coincidentally, my sister Jean had been driving a Dodge Dart and had gotten into a wreck, and the estimate to repair the body and frame was more than the car was worth.  Nick questioned me about the engine.  Having been in an accident, he feared it was damaged or leaked oil.  I assured him the engine was undamaged and in perfect condition.  So I sold my sister’s car to Nick.  But here’s the thing:  Nick swapped out the engine himself, right on his parent’s driveway!  That blew my mind.  To him, it was just another kindergarten puzzle.

While Nick was in graduate school at Rutgers, he worked at Sears Automotive in Nanuet, swapping out batteries, tires, and whatnot.  Around that time, I bought a Radio Shack TRS-80 microcomputer.   I told Nick I was dissatisfied with it. It had no software. I couldn’t do much with it.  Nick expressed envy, telling me how much more productive he could be in the chem lab with a microcomputer.  So I gave it to him.  This was about 1978.   A year or two later, Nick expressed his gratitude and confirmed how useful it was in the lab.  Note that PCs, as we know them, didn’t exist yet and neither did the Internet.  Once Nick got his PhD, he worked as a chemist for a series of pharmaceutical companies where he continued to leverage his computational and mechanical talents, to their benefit.

In recent years, we occasionally got together for dinner, both of us being partial to the Mason Jar in Mahwah.  Whenever we ate, to start, Nick always ordered a club soda and fried calamari, and I always ordered a Jack Daniels on the rocks, to celebrate the occasion.

We spoke on the phone occasionally.  Among other things, we compared notes about what we knew about old friends. Nick had knowledge about so many things–anything related to pharmaceuticals obviously, but also climate change, fracking, and anything mechanical, especially, cars, and even tanks, which were a special interest of his.  More recently, he spoke at length and in detail about his medical maladies. In hindsight, I realize that what was just as impressive as his knowledge was his ability to articulate what he knew clearly and concisely. He could explain anything to anybody. 

We talked about politics only a little. Nick was a hands-on, practical guy; whereas, I tend to be more abstract and philosophical.  Politics was the one subject about which he never elaborated. Nick was deeply conservative. He knew what he believed, and that was it. No need for discussion. Whenever I expressed anything the least bit liberal, which I sometimes did, if just to draw him out, he would dismiss it with a stubborn grunt or a snort.  And I say that with affection.  

We never talked about sports.  We never discussed religion.  Someday, when we’re both hopefully in heaven, I suppose Nick will be driving a Dodge Dart with Abba or Arrival playing on the radio, and I’ll be driving a Volkswagon Beetle with Bob Dylan or Led Zeppelin blasting away.  We’ll meet for dinner at the Mason Jar equivalent in Heaven.  To start, he’ll order a club soda and fried calamari. I’ll order a Jack Daniels on the rocks.  We won’t talk politics or religion, but we’ll have plenty of other things to talk about.