Word: kansdorf
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...DISTANT HORN, by Sven Stolpe (301 pp.; Sheed & Ward; $3.95), is within echoing distance of the works of François Mauriac and Graham Greene, in which anguished would-believers are pursued by both hell and heaven. Swedish Novelist Sven-Stolpe, 51, a Roman Catholic convert, tells of Edvard Kansdorf, an expatriate middle-aged Swede dying of cancer in Paris. He is a relapsed convert to Catholicism who tries to drown his consciousness as well as his conscience in cognac. The nausea rather than the pain of living makes him almost yearn for death. Around him revolve other people...
There is his agnostic doctor who offers Kansdorf morphine and a mercy killing. The doctor's wife had married him on the rebound when the man she really loved jilted her. This erstwhile suitor in turn became a Dominican friar, and to him Author Stolpe devotes a lengthy subplot. Father Perezcaballero is the bedeviled Graham Greene priest of the mislaid vocation. A brilliant preacher-intellectual, he has every gift but faith, all knowledge but that of the dimensions of his own pride. Brought to an appalled recognition of his vanity and emptiness, Perezcaballero somehow enables the dying Kansdorf...
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