En Route

More about the book

In this autobiographical novel, the author tells the story of a writer and his return to the Catholic faith. An admirer of the Middle Ages, cathedrals, and ancient religious painting, the hero stays in a convent to try to resolve his moral dilemma. A novel of conversion, which fails, it explores spiritual life, the church, and the convent, paving the way for later writers like Mauriac and Bernanos. Finally, like "Against Nature," it is a great narcissistic reverie, an interior monologue where erotic imagination and prayer, aestheticism and asceticism struggle. As the author himself said, he fell "like a meteorite."