Catholic Fiction outside the English-speaking world

novelist Su Xuelin

Britain’s Catholic Herald has published a wonderful little piece by Roy Peachey on the as yet little-known treasures to be found in fiction by Catholics outside the English-speaking world. Pointing out that we in the West tend to focus narrowly on the likes of Greene, Waugh, Chesterton, O’Connor, et al, Peachey directs our attention not only to Japanese author Shusaku Endo, whose Silence is fairly well known in the West — Martin Scorcese has been trying to make a film of it for some years now — but also to the Catholic fiction of Argentinian Manuel Gálvez, Chinese writer and critic Su Xuelin, and Japanese writer Sono Ayako, who has had two of her novels translated into English. (The fact that the latter two are also women novelists pleases me very much, I confess.)

According to Peachey,

One of the glories of the Catholic Church is its catholicity and we can only benefit from reading widely among our co-religionists, if only because, as C S Lewis put it in that same essay with which we started: “Two heads are better than one, not because either is infallible, but because they are unlikely to go wrong in the same direction.”

Read the entire article.