Word: boccaccio
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Giovanni (Decameron] Boccaccio, whose medieval priests seemed seldom far from a girl or a glass, would have been surprised at what happened to the Rev. Lino Gussoni in Rome last week. Born and raised in Italy but a longtime U.S. citizen. Father Gussoni. 39, was on leave from a welfare post in New York City's archdiocese, living in Rome for his health (a throat condition). After dinner with three lay friends from the U.S., he dropped in for a nightcap at a relatively unexciting nightspot, Club 84. "We're all Americans," said one of them. "We didn...
...umost the oft-stated "willing suspension of disbelief" that every playgoer is supposed to bring with him into a theatre. Shakespeare was never primarily concerned with story line, anyway; he was more interested in character than in plot. For All's Well he just snapped up a Boccaccio tale from a secondary source, complete with the trite gimmick of identification of rings. But he failed to expend the necessary effort on characteriaztion as well. Pascal once said, "Every author has a meaning in which all the contradictory passages agree, or he has no meaning at all." This play contains such...
MAGGIE CASSIDY, by Jack Kerouac (189 pp.; Avon; 50?), is a sequel to Doctor Sax (TIME, May 18), the beat Boccaccio's exuberant salute to boyhood. It follows Jack Duluoz and his roughneck buddies from the time they pass puberty (timidly, as if it were a haunted house at midnight) beyond the point at which Duluoz leaves Lowell, Mass., as Kerouac did, to play football for Columbia. Both books are written in the author's customary form, which is to say, utter formlessness. But while the disjointed episodes of Doctor Sax added up-after a number of sizable...
...weeks or not turned out a masterful and hilarious cock-and-ball story. Like the fabliaux, the play is "mosts pour la gent faire rire"; it embodies the English version of l'esprit gaulois. Merry Wives certainly joins the company of the other classic representatives of the fabliau tradition--Boccaccio's Decameron, Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, and Balzac's Contes Drolatiques. So cease, ye carpers...
...Laval the notorious pact that surrendered a fifth of besieged Ethiopia to Mussolini. Forced by public outrage to resign, he bounced back to office under Neville Chamberlain, backed Chamberlain's Munich appeasement because he felt it would intimidate Russia. "He passes," someone said, "from experience to experience, like Boccaccio's virgin, without discernible effect upon his condition...