Word: mauriac
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LINES OF LIFE (153 pp.)-François Mauriac- Farrar, Straus & Cudahy...
Crossing of Destinies. This is the emotional crux of Mauriac's story. He warns: "The marks left by one individual on another are eternal, and not with impunity can some other's destiny cross our own." Elisabeth, in despair, recognizes that her maternal love for Robert had concealed the extravagant sexuality of a starved woman. Even self-righteous Pierre has a brief moment of horror at what his retailing of gossip has caused, but he quickly comforts himself with the thought that there had been time for Robert to make a confession and receive the last sacraments...
François Mauriac, France's most famed living Catholic novelist, can say more in 150 pages than can most writers in twice that number. Mauriac seems to hold that the sins of a Robert Lagave are venial because he is the sort of mindless pagan who could scarcely recognize God if he met Him in a blaze of light on the road to Damascus. The real sinners are those who know God but love only themselves or their illusions. The killing of Robert Lagave brings with it a moment of shocked awareness that soon fades: Paula weeps...
SOUND OF A 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...
Avoiding Excesses. Simon's book drew a supporting protest from Nobel Prize-winning Roman Catholic Novelist Fran-gois Mauriac, followed by a solemn declaration signed by all French Catholic cardinals and archbishops warning "all those whose mission it is to protect persons and things" that "in the present crisis" they "have the obligation to respect human dignity and rigorously to avoid all excesses contrary to the law of nature...