Word: white
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Dates: during 1960-1960
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...WHITE STONE (271 pp.)-Carlo Coccioli-Simon & Schuster...
Such a hero is The White Stone's Don Ardito Piccardi, a priest haunted by the conviction that he no longer believes in God. As a religious novelist, Italian Author Carlo Coccioli, 40, is not quite up to the writing company he wants to keep. But with persistence, he tags manfully after the bigger models and every so often matches their literary stride...
Quest or Quarry? The White Stone is a sequel to Coccioli's Heaven and Earth (TIME, July 28, 1952), in which Don Ardito grew in power as a preacher while losing his capacity to love his fellow humans. That novel ended with an act of expiation in which the priest persuaded a German officer in World War II to execute him for acts committed by others. The present novel begins by reducing that sacrifice to irony. Perhaps as a symbolic agent for the humbling of Don Ardito's spiritual pride, the German officer stages a mock execution...
...nightscape of a religious ordeal, The White Stone is emotionally somber but intellectually spirited. Novelist Coccioli has failed to solve the perennial problem with religious heroes-making goodness seem exciting. But he has succeeded in an only slightly less exacting task, making goodness seem godly...
...Success Story, for instance, an ancient fellow approaches a park bench. "Then he turned himself carefully round; bringing into the spring sunlight, pale as a primrose, his dun face, hollow-cheeked and dry; the great orbits of his sunk eyes; the long nose fallen at the tip; his white mustache, of thin separate hairs like glass threads . . . A string of muscle jerked in the shadow of the cheekbone." His success is twofold. In the first place a child of three takes an incomprehensible fancy to him and for a few glorious minutes they play. Then the old boy experiences...