Book Review

The book for review this week is The Diary of a Country Priest, written by Georges Bernanos. At first, this one might be a struggle for the reader, particularly the reader of this blog (there are almost no animals mentioned in the story, and resultantly no funny pictures of animals). The Diary of a Country Priest is written in a diary format that takes some getting used to, and the country priest documents a lot of long, one-sided conversations that can be a challenge to follow. A large part of the difficulty comes from the fact that the story takes place in France, and so all of the names and places are French. It is hard enough already to follow a meandering plot in the aforementioned unconventional narrative format, but to make matters worse, here we have the author labeling critical plot elements in French, aka tapping a finger on the apostrophe key and mashing the keyboard with his free hand. There are quite a few different people to remember in this story, sometimes with five-part names like "M. le Cure d'Eutchamps"; resultantly, all the power of the reader's brain might easily be consumed just trying to keep track of the proper nouns. To me, this meant that while reading this book I often had no idea where, geographically, the country priest was, or who he was talking to.

After that last admission, I pause to ask the reader: Why are you continuing to read this review anyway? And, while paused, I have to tell some of my other readers that if they didn't have any problems with the French when they read it that's just great, but it does not mean I'm making a big deal out of nothing, or that I'm particularly slow.

So a helpful tip for the reader is to make mental associations fitting to those characters with unpronounceable names. These associations allow the reader to keep better track of the story line and follow character development. For instance, when seeing a combination of letters like "Mme Pegriot'll", the reader should condition himself to think "Tony Parker". This memory aid exercise will not only give the reader the ability to comprehend the existing story, but may in certain cases actually add interesting new elements to the plot, as the whole set of conversations and descriptions of a particular character will now be attributed by the mind to the Spur's point guard.

French-ness aside, The Diary of a Country Priest is a very good book. In summary, it will require perseverance and a strong memory, but it is a worthwhile read.

Rating: three stars.