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This warm, richly detailed biography brings the beloved saint alive in all his human and profoundly spiritual dimensions. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (19)

A Man of Conflicts and Faith
The spirit of Francis' life is one of love, peace, and learning devotion. He had a more colorful youth than I imagined, that led unexpectedly to a monastic life that influenced many in the Catholic faith, as well as many who aren't. Not being Catholic, I have my own perspectives. You can't read God's Fool without realizing that God can work with a deformed lump of clay to create a masterpiece from anyone's life. The process is as painful as a person's resistance to molding. Francis started out as a flamboyant son of a cloth merchant, showing off his finery, singing, and parading around town. His entrance into the order of monks was as unexpected as it was dramatic: stripping naked to denounce his familial relation to his father chasing him down for the money he made from stolen fabric, to contribute to the church, and the ill-gotten purse the church couldn't accept, and Francis' father wouldn't take back.

God's Fool is full of such colorful stories that paint a life of conflicts and high ambitions trying to come to terms with a Godly life. Green makes an effort to sort out mythology from fact, but seems to accept most of the miraculous aspects about Francis at face value. On the other hand, Green doesn't shy away from sharing coarser aspects that don't always paint Francis as a saint.

God's Fool is worth the read ifyou want to know details of a man who had a misdirected youth, but devoted his later life to serving God. Regardless of your faith, it's instructive to learn about a life of a man of conflicts and faith. Hmm, that sounds like a lot of us.

An aim to see perhaps the gretest Christian saint as he was
Green's account grows out of lifelong admiration for Francis, but for him no tribute can be better than bare truth. This life and times paints the whole social scene in which St. Francis moved. It gives Francis's quirks of personality equal treatment with his breathtaking heights of spirit. We see how the saint formed his network of supporters or patrons, and the deals he had to make along the way. When he, but not most of his followers received permission to preach, we see Francis admonishing his followers, "You don't know God's will. ... You say the bishops won't let you preach. Then convert those prelates by your obedience ... and they themselves will ask you to convert the people". (p. 197-98)

In Green's account we see the choices Francis made, his estimates of what was possible or not, and his tactics which formed one of the most revealing social experiments in Christian history.

-author of Correcting Jesus

Symbolism in God's Fool
This book is full of symbolism.For example Francis's struggle with his father, his disrobing in front of the Bishop and the Bishop covering him with his own cloak indicates that Francis had a new home, he was accepted by the Church.When his biological father chained him his earthly mother Pica set him free.This leads us to the thought that Mary can set us free from the sins that are our earthly chains. This is a book that is both an easy read yet a thoughful read.I recommend it highly.

tiny print
I just recieved this book and have looked forward to reading it.To my dismay, the print is much smaller than usual and difficult to read without eye strain.I find I can only read a couple of pages at a time.

Believable and beautifully written
I'd like to add my five-star vote for this wonderful little work.After reading it I'm convinced St Francis had a difficult life but despite the difficulty (maybe because of it) he persevered and kept obstinately optimistic and decent.He was cheerful because he gave himself to God, not because God gave him so much to be cheerful about. I could understand why he is so beloved, even though he gave us a tough example to follow.The prose is beautiful and the optimism is encouraging. ... Read more

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Crowded with incident: Vol. I (1900-1916) of Julian's autobiography
Also known as To Leave Before Dawn, which title a shopper might mistake for a novel.

Written in the early 1960s, this book is rich in childhood memories of Julian's Paris upbringing by his mother from the Old South in the States. It's much more colorful than monotonous Vol. III, his 3 years at the University of Virginia.

Having borne five daughters and son Charles 13 years older than Julian, Mother had a special place in her heart for her final child, and was never to perceive that Julian was gay. She drilled him in Protestant religion. But her attitude toward his flesh was negative. When his sister saw his hand busy beneath the blanket, she called Mother who pulled back the cover and said of his noodle, I'll cut it off. After bathing him, she said of his thing, Oh how ugly it is. Having seen museums and an art book or two, he repeatedly sketched heroic nudes, but without sex organs. Sensitized to pure versus impure, he felt simple nakedness was an infraction.

When Julian was 14, his mother died. He felt loss but not tearful dissolution. And there were still sisters to care for him. Now that Julian was pubescent, several brutes at the lycee persuaded him to manipulate himself. The result was "stupor and dizziness." He seldom gave in to this particular impurity thereafter. Also, a Catholic instructor (Julian's father had already converted to Catholicism) planted the idea that Julian was well suited to becoming a monk.

But it was 1914 and the World War commenced, and by 1916 the cannon sounds from 60 miles away were reaching Paris. At his father's suggestion, too-young Julian joined the ambulance corps to do his best with the steering wheel. And this leads to Vol. II, the war and aftermath, 1916-1920.

FOOTNOTE

Nothing is ever made of Julian's being raised in a house full of females. Were his mannerisms and speech affected? Surely no one in the house, including his rather remote father, ever explained procreation to him. That was traditionally left to the lycee rascals. Julian was too fastidious to reach for any marriage manual. In any case, nature delivers to every pubescent male a series of nightgrams demonstrating the sexual equipment--but Julian never mentions such. When he did begin picking up partners in 1923, I'm confident he confined himself to the several minor forms of indulgence. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

Who translated this novel? Holland or Green?
I compared this superb translation with the original french novel Minuit and discovered so many important differences that I can hardly believe that Vyvian Holland made so many changes, that he wrote and added complete episodes (Marcel almost raped Elisabeth) and also the character Mulot (who prevents Elisabeth from escaping). Mulot doesn`t figure at all in the original novel. I suspect the (American, bilingual) author himself made this English version of his fantastic novel he originally wrote in french. Who knows more about this?

The Fall of Le Maison Fontfroide
Orphaned at 12, Elizabeth flees her three dismal aunts and is taken into a stranger's family home. At 16, she must depart for a remote old manor: Fontfroide, decaying and in financial straits. Blessed with beauty, she nonetheless is so toughened by her past that she has the courage to explore the dark interiors and, one by one, encounters the ten other "guests." She doesn't realize that, like the others, she in all her youth is being enmeshed in a spider web.

Finally, one night she stumbles upon a sleeping figure, a rough-hewn but handsome youth. When awake, Serge eventually arouses in Elizabeth that sudden flowering of love, flesh, and death-defying obedience. They must leave this prison, Fontfroide!

In 2010, the reader may find the "house of mystery" theme in this 1936 novel overfamiliar, and the 16-year-old girl lacking complexity. But Green's deft interlacing of details, as always, engrosses.

The dramatic climax is not (or is?) to be believed.

Bewitching and Poetic
Elizabeth is taken up by her three aunts following the suicide of her mother. Avaricious and self-obsessed, these three ladies remain largely indifferent to the grief of the thirteen year old niece. Elizabeth runs away and is rescued by Arsene Lerat and his wife. Some years later Elizabeth's kind benefector dies, at which point Monsieur Edme, the headchaplain of a monestary invites her to reside at the monastic sombre chateau. Here she will find a plethora of ecclectic individuals who have been provided refuge by Monsieur Edme. He acts to these as a mentor and spiritual guide. It is in these strange surroundings that Elizabeth falls in love with Serge, a "virile Adonis" who had been adopted by Monsieur Edme's brother. Their passion suffuses the novel with intensity and becomes intoxicating following their doomed attempt to attain freedom from the monestary.

Julian Green's prose glistens with extraordinary limpidity in this novel which thanks to the Vyvyan Holland's superb translation ranks as one of his best.
"Freed from the gross illusion of daylight, the mind only aspires to invisible things; it remembers things which it thought it never knew; while the body was struggling in the midday light, it remained plunged in midday torpor, and now it wakes up softly, in happy wonder, to this great nocturnal paradise..."
(Quartet Encounters Publication) ... Read more

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How to Enrich Your Experience of Paris
This lovely little book will enrich your experience of Paris, whether it's your first or fiftieth visit. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

The shattering of a jeune fille
Also known, rather pointlessly, as The Closed Garden.

In 1908 in a provincial town, 18-year-old Adrienne lives with her selfish 60-year-old father and her old maid, tubercular sister. Their house overlooks a villa, soon rented by Madame LeGras, and a small white dwelling inhabited by an unknown doctor. Her claustrophobic life depresses young Adrienne. When she catches the merest glimpse of the doctor, and then another, she becomes obsessed with him, oh she loves him! She begins to go out each night, compulsively hanging around his home. Her sister, then her father, assume she is actually seeing a man, and put a stop to these mystery jaunts. They are driving her mad. Then her sister flees the stifling home, then the father meets his end. Adrienne is befriended by Madame LeGras, of dubious character. Adrienne's passion for the doctor burns higher and higher, culminating in full-blown hysteria.

This 1991 edition carries Green's 1973 Preface, revealing much about his writing of this early novel (1927). He had read Freud's Introduction to Psychoanalysis and found it repugnant, not a tool that Green cared to use. Yet from Green's own psyche, there emerged this "psychological study" of Adrienne Mesurat.

I fault this 256-page book for its repetitious overlength--30 or 40 pages worth could certainly go. And as elsewhere, Green magnifies all emotion to an extreme. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Grotesque avarice
Emily Fletcher is an only child, born to indifferent parents; deprived of love and tenderness, she is quiet and withdrawn. Her father confines himself to the library and takes solitary walks around the broding oak and pine sorrounding his Virginian family home. Her mother is proud and egoistic, cold and avaricious. The death of her husband and the introduction into the home of her cantankorous mother intensifies her obsessive economizing. She dismisses the servant and resolves to retain only the cook, an old African American woman who goes unpaid. Emily's mother will continue her ways by selling the family silver and taking in a lodger...
The opressive atmosphere of "avarice house" becomes a pervasive, endemic contagion that affects everyone, even Emily, irrespective of her efforts to escape such a stronghold by taking up work at a Methodist Church Charity workshop. Hatred, suspicion and a scrupolous vortex of miserly desires haunt the simplicity of this tale as it foreshadows the creeping of cynicism into the ease of innocence. (Quartet Encounters Publication)
Gothic in its atmosphere, sober in its observation, terrifying in its images, Julien Green creates a world dark, brooding and people by women of a grotesque miserly affectation. ... Read more

Product Description
Set in the American South just before the Civil War, this is a family saga of love, political intrigue and, above all, extravagant living. It has at its centre a modern psychological portrait of the heroine, a complex, sensitive and wilful personality. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

In a word:Odd
I agree with the previous (and only) customer review.Maybe the culture in the antebellum South was so totally different from today that the modern mind just doesn't get it, but I thought many of the conversations, expressed sentiments, and actions were just plain odd.I think part of the problem is that none of the characters were developed enough that they made any sense.
Worse still is that the main character, Elizabeth, is pretty hard to like, as are most of the others.I kept hoping throughout this book and the sequel, The Stars of the South, that she would redeem herself in some way; many times she almost did, but she never quite made it.As for the others, I found most of them very tiresome.
Especially disappointing was that the most interesting character was killed in a duel.He was the best part of the story.

A Spoiled Brat and a Pointless Story
What a terrible book - I kept with it, praying that it would get better, and it was just a frustrating slog.Elizabeth is just a spoiled little idiot, and there's no point to any of the suffering that takes place because of her selfishness.Don't waste your time. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Green's college days in America come back to haunt him, and us.
This novel draws upon Green's three years at the all-male University of Virginia (not specifically named in the book), 1919-1922. Of simple poor country origins, Joseph, with strong attachment to the Bible, arrives on campus. He takes a room in the boarding house of Mrs. Dare, though he is critical of her lurid makeup and cigarette smoking. He is repeatedly offended by the young men's drinking and visits to a house of prostitution, and they find Joseph with the flaming red hair a real case. Artistic Simon, however, promptly forms a crush and when put down by Joseph, leaves for home. Praileau and Joseph come to fisticuffs, reconcile, but do not become friends--but Praileau retains a strange attachment to Joseph. (This is a reversal of Green's actual experience with Mark, whom Green loved but could not express.)

Prior to the return of Mrs. Dare's adopted daughter, the seductive Moira, to the residence, Joseph moves to another house, where his kind understanding acquaintance David lives--David is bound for the ministry.

Joseph, ever more fervent about his religion, is warned that some students are going to play a tormenting joke on him. Thus Moira comes to his room to seduce him, but there she strangely spends much time writing to her girlfriend about the situation. Finally provoked, Joseph attacks her and falls from his hope of grace.

In controlled panic, bewildered, he wanders from the campus. And on a distant path Praileau, this supposedly casual acquaintance, is waiting for him with a plan for Joseph, murderous Joseph, to flee the country. Will he save himself?

As Green's novels go, this one is rather simplistic. There is much believable dialogue, and less detailing of the protagonist's conflict over soul versus flesh. Many readers will be reminded of their first months away from home, on campus.

I was reminded of Montgomery Clift in A Place in the Sun when he tries to flee his fate, but cannot.

Strange But Interesting Tale
This book provides a somewhat strange tale through characters who do not seem strange as they are presented. There is the protagonist, perhaps late teens, still in school, rigidly religious and attempting to take a high-minded path in life. There are his school friends, less religious and more taken with less serious pursuits. When Moira, a typical vixen, meets the protagonist, the combination proves more explosive than expected with tragic and unexpected consequences. Translator's Kiss ... Read more

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1972 doctoral dissertation laced with French excerpts
The many extracts from the writings of Julian Green (1900-1998) remain in French. Since I've read, in translation, most of the works cited, I just jumped over these passages. This dissertation by John M. Dunaway approaches Green from three perspectives: the Mystic, stemming from Green's progress through Protestantism, Catholicism, Buddhism/Hinduism, and back to Catholicism; the Sensualist, who struggled to suppress desires of the flesh (to make matters worse, Green was a homosexual); and the Artist, emerging vigorously from Green's dichotomous nature. Dunaway's chapters are:

1. Journal and Autobiography: The First Two Selves
2. The Pilgrim's Descent: LeVoyageur sur la terre [The Pilgrim on the Earth]
3. Self Discovery in L'Autre sommeil [The Other Sleep]
4. Escape and Deliverance in Le Visionnaire [The Dreamer] and Minuit [Midnight]
5. The Violence of the South: Moira and Sud [The South, a play]
6. The Concept of the Third Self

Plus Notes, Selected Bibliography, and Index.

Though Dunaway mentions a few other novels by Green, he actually explicates less than half of those available as of 1971. His theme of the three aspects of Julian Green seems rather obvious, Green having published volumes of his Journals and Vols. 1-3 of his Autobiography. But Green did favor 26-year-old John Dunaway with a private interview in 1971.

At the time of publication of this book, Dunaway was assistant professor and chairman of the Department of Modern Foreign Languages at Mercer University, Macon, Georgia.

... Read more

Product Description
Webster's bibliographic and event-based timelines are comprehensive in scope, covering virtually all topics, geographic locations and people. They do so from a linguistic point of view, and in the case of this book, the focus is on "Julien Green," including when used in literature (e.g. all authors that might have Julien Green in their name). As such, this book represents the largest compilation of timeline events associated with Julien Green when it is used in proper noun form. Webster's timelines cover bibliographic citations, patented inventions, as well as non-conventional and alternative meanings which capture ambiguities in usage. These furthermore cover all parts of speech (possessive, institutional usage, geographic usage) and contexts, including pop culture, the arts, social sciences (linguistics, history, geography, economics, sociology, political science), business, computer science, literature, law, medicine, psychology, mathematics, chemistry, physics, biology and other physical sciences. This "data dump" results in a comprehensive set of entries for a bibliographic and/or event-based timeline on the proper name Julien Green, since editorial decisions to include or exclude events is purely a linguistic process. The resulting entries are used under license or with permission, used under "fair use" conditions, used in agreement with the original authors, or are in the public domain. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Three stars because the book is studded with French excerpts, narrowing its usefulness for Americans
Online research indicates that Anthony H. Newbury is an English doctor of philosophy, and the text is essentially his thesis (or dissertation?). Several earlier books by others discuss the earlier works of Julian Green (1900-1998), who published his first novel in 1926. The present book, copyright 1986, discusses:

Moira (1950; laid in America)

the play Sud (1953; America) [South]

the play L'Ennemi (1954; France)

Le Malfaiteur (1956; France; the important "Confession of Jean," the homosexual, was added to the text in 1973) [The Transgressor]

Chaque homme dans sa nuit (1960; America) [Each in His Own Darkness]

L'Autre (1971; Denmark) [The Other One]

Newbury can also draw on Green's Journals and 4-volume autobiography (1960s, 1974).

Having read most of these works in translation, I just jumped over the French and neglected the 1216 footnotes.

Green's lifelong obsession was the salvation of his soul in accordance with Roman Catholicism. All sexual practice was anathema except to procreate in marriage bond. As a homosexual, he slipped from grace, not because of absolutely overwhelming drive but because he would assent in his mind, then afterward feel hatred of all flesh.

If his religion permeated his fiction, I would not care to read it. But his stories and characters are imbued with all the faults of us humans and he does not preach or edify. Often death provides the punctuation.

Newbury's examination of this latter segment of Green's work is exhausting and he respects all the author's beliefs. But there were still more books to come, including two long "Southern" novels that might please French readers but leave American readers longing for the born-and-bred Dixiana of Margaret Mitchell.



... Read more