There’s nothing more true than fiction. And God, of course.
It’s Italio Calvino who writes that words make us feel “in harmony with the disharmony of others, myself, and the world,” and his sentiment finds truth in the lives of all his capital-R Readers. How very Romantic to rest in uncertainty, and yet how Postmodern to acknowledge how confused we all are about the state of humanity. Calvino didn’t mean it this way, but isn’t a central premise of Christianity to unite ourselves in faith, hope, and love even when life brings us too often to disagreement, war, and disillusionment? Words can be that uniting force.
Our hearts will be restless until they rest in You, Reader God, but when I read certain books I feel a little more at peace. Being an English major, I have encountered many, many books in the past four years; there have been long, yellowing, cracked, offensive, tear-jerking, shocking ones, and many were worth the time. But only a few qualify for my list of books that Make The Universe Make Sense.
There are books that feature God, even when they don’t say so. Here are a few of my favorites. I’ve limited myself to five to save The Torch editors from a headache.
1. Les Miserables by Victor Hugo.
Please read all 1,466 pages of this. When I read the unabridged edition in June 2019, I had just completed Perspectives I and had added a philosophy major. After finals, I was in dire need of more philosophy but not in a lecturing, mansplained way. So, I went for the rambling dramatics of revolutionary France instead.
On the last page, I wrote a note about Les Mis, calling it “a book that holds answers to questions many people don’t know to ask.”
I can’t say that God is Jean Valjean, but the mercy Monsieur 24601 demonstrates throughout the text certainly is reminiscent of the divine. It’s Valjean’s mercy and compassion that are able to change Javert’s entire outlook on the world. Javert once believed that there was one singular right way to live, with untempered justice; Valjean proposed an alternate path, one that tempers justice with mercy, and it is undeniably more beautiful.
If you’re looking to experience your Catholic faith, or life’s outlook, in a completely new way, read this book! The reward of a new perspective is worth working through the sections about Waterloo and sewers.
2. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte.
Confession time: when I first read this in high school, I thought Jane should move away with St. John. How embarrassing!
Encountering the novel again this year, I was reminded that womanhood is power. Kindness, thoughtfulness, and femininity are so often labeled as weaknesses but Jane Eyre proves to us that they are most certainly strengths (Beth from Little Women is yet another example of this). Though she’s constantly ridiculed for being “less than,” Jane insists that her interpretation of the world, and the quality of her own soul in relation to God, matters.
I have met exactly zero men who have finished this book. Too many people see a book about a woman written by a woman and think, that can’t be important. Criminal! Charlotte Bronte didn’t write, “I am no bird; and no net ensnares me; I am a free human being, with an independent will; which I now exert to leave you,” so men in 2022 could exhibit only the worst traits of Mr. Rochester.
3. Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse.
First of all, why did the white German grandson of Protestant missionaries write a novel about Buddhist philosophy? It’s so good even Harry Styles puts this book on his list of most treasured possessions. Does anybody know how he did that?
Because this book is gorgeous. I didn’t even mean to read it—I had intended to skim it in case it ever came up as a topic in philosophy class—but before the 3 a.m. coyotes howled, I had finished reading, closed the back cover, and stared into the void for… a while.
As you read this, you just know what Siddhartha will conclude after a series of follies: that love is the most important current in the flowing river of our lives. “They both listened silently to the water, which to them was not just water, but the voice of life, the voice of Being, the voice of perpetual Becoming,” Hesse writes. As we read, live, and love, perhaps finding struggles and joys along the way, we flow, united, rooted in the force of the only thing that Is: the Divine.
Honorable Mentions:
1. Intimations by Zadie Smith.
“Even as I was peering in at them I wished they were peonies.” Don’t we all wish they were peonies? Or that war was peace, that disease was health? This work of Smith’s is not fiction, but instead a work of creative nonfiction written in the midst of the pandemic. I read it for a creative writing class this year in a stroke of good fortune, and it reminds me to listen to the camouflaged voice of God – he’s always there.
2. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard.
This book is a jolting reminder why the natural world is absolutely absurd yet still the most real thing that exists. Of Aquinas’ five proofs of God’s existence, the Grand Designer argument is the most compelling to me, and Dillard will convince you of this as well.
There’s the start of my list of waters that flow towards God; what are yours?
Mary Rose is a Senior majoring in English and Perspectives and minoring in Management for Social Impact and Public Good. In addition to reading and writing, she enjoys bopping with the Full Swing dance team, working at the Church in the 21st Century Center, and leading projects for IATG: The Feminist Society of BC.
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