SOURCE: "Light for a Somber World," in The Saturday Review, Vol. XXXIX, No. 3, January 21, 1956, p. 17.

An American educator and critic specializing in French literature, LeSage is the author of The French New Novel ( 1962), The French New Criticism (1966), and four book-length studies of the writer Jean Giraudoux. In the following favorable review of The Lamb, LeSage argues that Maurìac has "reached in this novel . . . a point of unsurpassable mastery. "

Françcois Mauriac, often described as the outstanding novelist of the Catholic Renascence and who, among living French writers, is surely the greatest artist in fiction, undertakes in his new novel The Lamb to demonstrate the most sublime of Christian concepts—that of martyrdom for the redemption of mankind.

The solemn mystery is acted out against the vineyards and pine-forests of the Landes country, where old families moulder in ancestral dwellings. We have met this family before in Mauriac's...