Word: campanati
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...pivotal characters are fictional: an aging bestselling novelist named Kenneth Marchal Toomey and Carlo Campanati, an earthy Italian priest destined to become Pope. Toomey is modeled on W. Somerset Maugham and Campanati is an exuberant exaggeration of Pope John XXIII...
...first line is meant to be a grabber: "It was the afternoon of my eighty-first birthday, and I was in bed with my catamite when Ali announced that the archbishop had come to see me." The cleric wants to discuss K.M.T.'s role in the canonization of Campanati, the recently deceased "Pope Gregory XVII." Many years before in Chicago, Toomey had witnessed Campanati's miraculous healing of a child dying from meningitis...
Famous author and future Pope also share family ties; Toomey's sister was once married to Campanati's brother. French, English, Italian and American blood mix in this distended family saga. Blood also flows in the trenches of World War I, the alleys of Prohibition Chicago, the death camps of Nazi Germany, the bush of contemporary revolutionary Africa...
...contrast, Carlo Campanati, saver of souls, relishes his physical existence...
...Campanati also finds time to draw blueprints for the ecumenical reform of the church and deliver lectures in basic apologetics to the wayward Toomey. Ideas about good and evil, the spirit and the flesh, are regularly set forth. But Earthly Powers is no Magic Mountain. Having to cover much ground quickly, Burgess shaves his peaks...
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