Word: coccioli
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Manuel the Mexican, by Carlo Coccioli. Against a Mexican-Indian backdrop, a Passion play unfolds in which the 21-year-old Manuel symbolizes both Christ and the ancient Aztec God, Tepozteco-proof, perhaps, that God and Dios...
...contention of Italian Novelist Carlo Coccioli that both events-Passion and Passion play-had an identical reality for the witnesses. In the modern world, argues Coccioli, an Oberammergau can only be a charade; since the Middle Ages, it is only in a place like Indian Mexico, with its hallucinatory sense of time, where past and present are meaningless, that the supernatural can be accepted as reality and the actual world as an illusion...
More than a Puzzle. Author Coccioli has told the life and death of Indians of Tepoztlan, which parallel the Gospels in elaborate detail. Skill, insight and a rich, image-decked style make this chronicle more than a theological teaser or a jigsaw puzzle about just which Biblical figure is lurking under what sombrero. Coccioli has achieved a mosaic of miniatures in which the state of Morelos is the Kingdom of Judaea, and in which the pre-Columbian pantheon is transfigured to decorate a Christian altarpiece. Coccioli has leaped over the two stumbling blocks-banality and blasphemy-that beset the path...
...novelist Coccioli's Mexico, pageantry of gods and devils makes a public matter of the dramas of the heart, and Christ must compete with old idols. In a thousand villages the Aztec gods-whose shrines were toppled by the conquistadors -are remembered by the defeated. Ancient drums as well as bells sound from the church tops. In such a world. Manuel the Mexican came naturally by his belief that Tepozteco, lord of his race, was also Christ, and that Tonantzin, the Aztec Virgin, was also Christ's mother...
...some readers, at least, Manuel the Mexican will be a memorable tour de force. Novelist Coccioli is able to evoke the "malicious torpor" of the bizarre Mexican scene more brilliantly than anyone since Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano, which was the story of a man to whom drink was a religion. Coccioli succeeds in the more difficult story of a man intoxicated by God. His complicated moral seems to be that sanctity is inviolable, that revelation is continuous, that time present is time past, and that, whether or not Christ is also the Lord Tepozteco, it is unarguable...