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

Imagine if Magic Mountain was deeply sincere instead of hyper-ironic, and if it took place in a small French village instead of a super-fancy hospital, and if it was only a third as long but the plot, characterization and description were way, way more dense, and if it was written by a Catholic Frenchman. It might sound nothing like Magic Mountain by now, but Bernanos and Mann both wrote impressive symbolic 'state of Europe' books that don't exactly leave you with the feeling that Europe's doing really well for itself. This isn't as good as MM, and is probably more difficult to get a handle on, but it's well worth reading, although it really is incredibly dark. Everyone ends up looking bad, the old, the young, men, women, the religious, the atheistic, the rich, the poor. "The poor no longer have words to describe what they're lacking, and if those words are missing, it's because they've been robbed of them by you," the priest suggests. "In a world organized for despair the hour will come when preaching hope will be the exact equivalent of tossing a live coal into a powder barrel."

The translation isn't bad. Not perfect, but also not flat the way a lot of translations end up. And the introduction is pretty good, although it gets a little silly: Bernanos' tale of the death of an 'organic community,' torn apart by world war I and the approaching II is likened to our situation in which we're being torn apart by... the internet and television. Yeah. Poor us. ( )