Word: saint
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...week was treated to the rare spectacle of laymen trying to suppress a religious book. The hierarchy, having given its imprimatur, was not likely to withdraw it. Historic truth must be placed before petty local susceptibilities, editorialized Madrid's Catholic daily, Ya, adding that the behavior of the saint's grandfather proved that divine grace is not a hereditary privilege...
...books he has tried to make more than "entertainments" -he has written about sinners, who are last seen heading in various directions (to heaven, hell, or purgatory). It was in the cards that sooner or later he would try his hand at a story about a good person-a saint. In his latest novel, published this week in the U.S., Graham Greene shows his hand...
...very hardened sinner who could read this love story without a pang of recognition, a momentary enlargement of the heart. But when, in the last 50 pages, the key changes from the familiar minor to an unfamiliar major-from the unmaking of a mistress to the making of a saint-even the warmest reader may feel his conviction cooling. For the machinery from which the rescuing God emerges is less the novelist's than the churchman...
...Greene's novels, is loaded with buried questions, like mines. And the terms of his story are so studiedly, elaborately mundane that at first the unwary reader is hardly aware of the muffled explosions of the answers. (One of his buried questions : Must a woman who becomes a saint necessarily think of herself as "a bitch and a fake?" Greene's answer...
...this story, Greene apparently intended to show two things: 1) that saints are real human beings, who "happen" nowadays just as they always have and always will; 2) that no love affair, however sordid, can escape the terrible, endless implications of love. For some readers, he may have succeeded in demonstrating both; but for many his saint will seem as faraway and unreal as T. S. Eliot's Celia in The Cocktail Party...