Review by Booklist Review
Novelist Gordon (There Your Heart Lies, 2017) hadn't thought much about Thomas Merton (1915-68) as a writer, but when asked -- because she "was the only literary person at Columbia known to be a practicing Catholic" -- to lecture about him in honor of the centenary of his birth, she accepted. Here she expands on the lecture, focusing on Merton as writer while acknowledging that he is known and read today not as either writer or Trappist monk but as a writer-monk. She discusses Merton's correspondence about writing with fellow Catholic authors Evelyn Waugh and Czeslaw Milosz; the autobiographical best-seller The Seven Storey Mountain (1948); the only novel (of four) that he saved, My Argument with the Gestapo (1969), written in 1941; and the six volumes of his journals. Gordon finds his poetry minor and his pious moments off-putting, so she goes straight to his greatest gift: his power of close observation, which perforce displays the love of language he shared with his master, James Joyce. Gordon quotes lavishly throughout, making this intense little book an ideal introduction to Merton for literary readers.--Ray Olson Copyright 2018 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
This brilliant, incisive work from biographer, novelist, and memoirist Gordon (Reading Jesus) examines the relationship-and tension-between 20th-century Christian philosopher Thomas Merton's dual roles as writer and monk. Gordon approaches her subject through four facets of Merton's writing life: his relationship with the church that censored him; his bestselling memoir, The Seven-Story Mountain; his novel My Argument with the Gestapo; and his private journals (which Gordon quotes from extensively). The author depicts a man often in conflict with himself and his church, a man who felt compelled to write and yet who hated being pressured to write: "I am sickened by being treated as an article for sale, as a commodity... God have mercy on me," and later, "Today I feel hateful, and miserable, exhausted, and I would gladly die... Abbot Dom James [his host and patron] is in absolute control of a bird that everyone wants to hear sing." The section on his journals, where Merton expressed himself freely, is the strongest part of the book-particularly Gordon's reaction to entries written shortly before Merton's death in 1968. "Because this flawed mess of a man lived every day with fullness, with a heartfelt passion," Gordon writes, "I close the journal, and I weep." Readers will be just as affected by this intelligent, moving book. (Dec.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
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