Word: madonna
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...MERMAID MADONNA (310 pp.)-Stratis Myrivilis-Crowell...
...green-eyed girl, found as a baby by a drink-fuddled Greek fisherman and grown into a woman who has the local boys dreaming. By most fictional standards, this should be the cutoff point, the end of any sensible man's interest in a novel called The Mermaid Madonna. No one should make that mistake. Author Stratis Myrivilis is probably the finest of living Greek writers. The Mermaid Madonna is the first of his books to come to the U.S., and even with its liberal dash of corn it introduces a writer who makes the true novelist...
...villagers are not only poor, they are refugees from Turkish Anatolia. They are superstitious, backbiting and Christian to the point of worshiping a mermaid Madonna whom a passing fisherman has painted on a wall of the local church. Their life comes from the sea, and it is the sea that dominates the novel. The heroine worships it, the hero dies in it, and the plain villagers are bounded by it as their neighbors are bounded by olive groves. The young men may lust for Smaragthi. but they lust even more for the sea and the role of boat...
...difference that ranges Roman Catholicism and Orthodoxy on one side and Protestantism on the other. Extolling the role of the Virgin Mary in Roman Catholic theology, the Pontiff, while not mentioning Protestants by name, lamented the "many who also hold to the name of Christians who have forgotten the Madonna and left her outside their door...
...Mediterranean world. Rising in sheer purple splendor above the plain 30 miles inland from Barcelona, Spain, the mountain is topped with spires of steeple-like rock. And there, inside the crown, perches an ancient fortress-monastery, where the "Black Virgin" is enshrined. Legend has it that the dark wooden Madonna with the Child upright in her lap appeared as if by miracle within a cave in the mountain one day ten centuries ago. First a church, then a monastery was built near the peak in her honor. The shrine became a military strongpoint in the struggle between Catalonian Christians...