Book review 1: Judas by Marcel Pagnol

Marcel Pagnol is best known for his autobiographic stories of childhoood in Provence (My Father's Glory and My Mother's castle) and Provence fiction (Jean de Florette, Manon of the Springs). All of these are delightful, they radiate a tender love and wonder at the world, and people all across Europe relate to them.

The book I'm talking about isn't very frequently published, let alone reviewed. People may come to read it if they buy the full collection of the author's writings. It hasn't even got a single review on Amazon.fr, and it was never translated into anything. It had the same fate as one of my other favourite books by Pagnol: his radiant translation of Virgil's Bucolics.

Pagnol's younger brother, Paul, was a sensitive boy who became a sheperd in the provence. Marcel went on to study in Paris and had an academic career there. But Marcel remained incredibly fond of his brother, and they would spend time together whenever they could. In both the Bucolics and in Judas, the love between them jumps from the page, but more so in Judas, which is a work of fiction (and not a translation) so there is more scope.

Judas is the story of your actual Judas Iscariot, but what a story! Before it became trendy to think so, Pagnol thought that the whole treason thing made no sense, and that Judas must have thought that this was an order. Anyway, that book is a love letter to Jesus, written by a very good author who really is thinking about his own brother the whole time. I've never read anything written with such tenderness. I must have read it twenty times. Each time I make it home to my mom's, I'll grab my copy, lie in the garden's grass and loose myself in it. The friends I've lent it to have also loved it.

Along with Don Camillo, it must have helped to define the (somewhat un-hebrew) Jesus that I relate to.