The Geneaology of Decadence?

Soumission by Michel Houellebecq. Paris: Flammarion, 2015. Hardcover, 300 pages, $50.When Joris-Karl Huysmans published À rebours in 1884, a novel that would come to be known as “la bible de la décadence,” the writer and literary critic Barbey d’Aurevilly weighed in...

The Holiness of Hobbitry

Tolkien’s Sacramental Vision: Discerning the Holy in Middle-earth by Craig Bernthal. Angelico Press, 2014. Paperback, 316 pages, $17. In 1999, Joseph Pearce lamented that J. R. R. Tolkien “is not generally perceived to be one of the key protagonists of the Catholic...

Epistolary Gems

The Letters of T. S. Eliot, Vol. 5: 1930–1931 edited by Valerie Eliot and John Haffenden. London: Faber & Faber, 2014; New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015. Hardcover, 878 pages, $45/$85. “If I could destroy every letter I have ever written in my life I would do...

I Would Kill for the Thrill of First Love

Marta Oulie by Sigrid Undset, translated by Tiina Nunnally, with an introduction by Jane Smiley. University of Minnesota Press, 2014. Paperback, 128 pages, $16. Marta Oulie opens with the confession, “I have been unfaithful to my husband.” So it comes as no surprise...