Night Is Darkest

Night Is Darkest

First English-language edition
Author	Georges Bernanos
Original title	Un mauvais rêve
Translator	W. J. Strachan
Country	France
Language	French
Publisher	Plon
Publication date	1950
Published in English	1953, Bodley Head
Pages	359

Night Is Darkest is a novel by the French writer Georges Bernanos, published posthumously in 1950. Its French title is Un mauvais rêve which means "a bad dream". It tells the story of a writer who is out of ideas and has lost his motivation. The book was published in English in 1953, translated by W. J. Strachan.^[1]

Reception

R. D. Charques reviewed the book in The Spectator:

Un Mauvais Reve, a posthumous work, now translated under the title of Night is Darkest, leaves an unhappy impression. In the figure of the novelist Emmanuel Ganse, a latter-day Balzac, who has pretty well exhausted himself as a writer and who keeps going only with the aid of three secretaries, Bernanos seems cruelly bent on guying himself. His honesty here, however, is swamped by the exacerbated preoccupation with contemporary literary names, jobs and reputations and by the arbitrary violences of behaviour of the sickly and sinister trio of secretaries.^[2]

References