Dear readers,
What a joy to begin this column from a place of abundance! Forbidding, austere, often terrifying, occasionally ecstatic abundance!
I’m talking, of course, about nuns in literature.
Though I come from a mixed-faith family, I have basically zero real-life experience with Catholicism and its servants. So my research for this newsletter has been eye-opening. I knew about Muriel Spark’s allegorical treatment of Watergate enacted by a cunning abbess (only you, Muriel). Ditto Denis Diderot’s “La Religieuse,” which began as an extended literary prank and somehow became a proto-Enlightenment cri de coeur.
But there’s more. I dare you to remain unmoved by the correspondence between the 12th-century philosopher-nun Héloïse and her illicit husband, Abelard, who was castrated after he impregnated her. (For good measure, both were then cloistered.) Nor can we forget Teresa of Ávila, exhaustive chronicler and enthusiast of mortifications of the flesh.
So, yes, nuns have provided a true buffet, even for us spiritual mongrels. Were this a semester-long seminar I could reach back to some of the very first women of God in literature (Chaucer’s Prioress, Margery Kempe) — but to meet the moment, here are two more recent treatments of literary sisters.
—Joumana
“Stone Yard Devotional,” by Charlotte Wood
Fiction, 2023
True to its form, this quietly unsettling Australian novel — a finalist for this year’s Booker Prize — burrows quickly and deeply into the spiritual consciousness of its unnamed narrator. She is an atheist, an adult orphan, a dedicated steward of the Earth seeking retreat. These conditions are enough to propel her from her house, marriage and job in Sydney to a convent near her childhood home, on a highland in New South Wales.
Her move is less an act of giving up than of giving in: to the years of unending grief after the death of her parents, to her practically animal need for withdrawal. Her observations are as keen as an osprey’s. On the sisters’ grounds, she notes early in her first stay, “the silence is so thick it makes me feel wealthy.”
Then come three practically biblical events: a mouse infestation, the delivery of a dead nun’s remains after her mysterious death overseas, and the arrival of a woman from the narrator’s past, which elicits hot waves of shame along with an astute moment of recognition by the narrator about her environment: “Everyone here has hurt someone by coming,” she says.
I can’t call the narrator’s voice affable, not quite. She is companionable, alive to her circumstances, awake in all senses. Joining the convent, for her, is neither exactly an abdication of the material world nor an expression of faith in the spiritual one. But it makes for engaging reading. The narrator’s feelings might best be summed up by the grace note she offers after confessing her uneasiness about the Catholic Church’s legacy and how it tramples on her own values: “Yet here I am. Wrestle, wrestle.”
Read if you like: Thomas Merton, frescoes, the Rosettis.
Available from: This one won’t be released in the United States until February, but if you’re impatient you can readily find copies online from sellers in Australia, England or (as I did) Canada.
“Carnality,” by Lina Wolff
Fiction, 2019 (in Swedish); 2022 (in English)
“‘Nietzsche says man is evil but woman is mean.’ What kind of nun would quote something like that?” Meet Lucia, the thumbless sister and religious authority behind a reality TV show with a rabid fan base and rather exigent morality clause.
Look — no possible plot synopsis will satisfy the questions you are sure to have. This is a story of a Scandinavian woman in Madrid, sweating through her fascia in peak summer heat, who invites a shady character named Mercuro to crash at her rented flat. Mercuro is a rake with all the charm of a mongoose, who’s coincidentally on the run from the aforementioned Lucia, a bloodthirsty nun with a score to settle.
Some books you read for coherence, hospital corners, faultless plaiting; others you read for the pyrotechnics and jump scares, the tickles of your psyche’s dark and forgotten corners. Obviously this one — translated from the Swedish by Frank Perry — is in the latter camp, a sort of glossy and insane brochure that shows you the outcome of decisions you would under no circumstances make.
Lucia’s colleague sums up their TV project neatly: “People can turn to us with their problems of the flesh, and we will help them find their souls.” Sounds like “The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City,” but juicier. Would watch!
Read if you like: “House of Villains,” Montel Williams, la corrida de toros.
Available from: The schadenfreude section of your local bookstore, marital counselors’ waiting rooms, or direct from Other Press.
Why don’t you …
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Venture into Hernán Diaz’s debut, a weird western featuring a colossal Swede as its hero?
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Fall in thrall to a chic widow in Southern Italy, by way of Goliarda Sapienza’s rediscovered novel “Meeting in Positano”?
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Zigzag through the Loire Valley with Kermit Lynch, the author of a madcap wine memoir that’s far more fun and literary than it has any need to be?
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