A Life of Christ/Man of Nazareth

...In brief mediately caught up in the fancy foot- Despite the book's jacket, this is not work of a much more talented writer who Debray's "first fiction...

...Why can't they stay at A LIFE OF CHRIST stuff of Burgess went down easily, too home, instead of coming here to Shusaku Endo easily...

...But for sure it pace slow, the history interesting, the straightforward passages flatly and exwill still be around and cherished when tone reverent, as would befit a man who pertly stating the world of the novel...

...And I quickly had my fill...

...Perhaps, tion is what motivates Debray's hero, as we sometimes reject those plodding, Frank, who has come from Switzerland Anthony Burgess well-intentioned friends of ours, I'd not McGraw-Hill, $10.95, 357 pp...

...evangelize the Indians...

...In his attempt to make Jesus said-"To reconstruct this puzzle in the From the East comes Shusaku Endo the cinematic centerpiece, he lost the third person, to put together the scattered and his Jesus is approached carefully, meaning of the man's life...

...While there, he encounters wanted to do was take me along for a the curiously reversed and dispersed HERE ARE TWO more biographies of walk...

...introduction, development, crisis, deNot that Jesus has to be dealt with carved flute...

...by Helen R. Lane is far superior to that of fused all the way through her pregnancy Regis Debray's earlier writings are so the novel by Rosemary Sheed...

...And from the West, An- nouement...

...He published could show me a Herod suffering from UNDESIRABLE ALIEN, by Regis Debray, two stories, The Border and Young Man gout, a Jesus who married only to have translated by Rosemary Sheed, Viking, in the Know, and their translation in 1968 his wife die and a Mary who was con- $9.95, 235 pp...

...to an unnamed country bordering the waited long enough for him...

...but 100-piece philharmonic in the pit...

...is trying to tell his people, the Japanese, Burgess publishes his next dozen "The underground has its own of a man they know as little about as we excesses-which shouldn't take him too aristocracy-an aristocracy of very long...

...A little Jesus, East and West later the same character adds, "Christ, I wish these tinpot philosophers would .leave us in peace...

...I quickly flagged...

...I'd wanted Caribbean to join the revolutionary to be swept away and all my friend Endo Paul Wilkes movement...

...Frank writes his story, he saysways that one wonders if, indeed, it is the superficialities and turned into a biblical much as Debray himself might have same person under consideration...

...Once back with Endo I felt I was in the A comparable attempt at forcing a company of a good, old friend, a baker of perspective on experience through ficMAN OF NAZARETH substantial whole wheat loaves...

...Thus, in addition to the narthony Burgess who obviously feels facts soooo solemnly, nor for that fact, accu- rative of undercover struggle, we read are springboards and the only way to tell rately...

...Good absence-and the highest title of all is intentions, my friend, but...

...bureaucracy of the insurgents, takes part the most written-about man in his- Burgess's book is the stepchild of his in some deadly shoot-outs and falls in tory...

...Thank good- fragments of our so uncommon life, to quietly, as if his story is to be told ac- ness Jesus, in his real life, opened out of try to get the pieces into a straight line: companied by a simple tune on a hand- town...

...asks one of his characters, serious a matter to be left to the histothick, creamy butterscotch...

...But then, slowly it dawned on me with America that he cannot resist referring to Yet readers will look past Frank's characthe creeping awareness of a little boy them in this his first novel...

...And, by two veteran writers who Jesus of Nazareth television series, love with a committed revolutionary, which, to me, had the same glaring treat him in two such vastly different Celia...

...conferred by death, by murder or execuI switched to Burgess and was im- tion...

...which sold 300,000 copies in Japan-is trying to figure out whether Frank's adSo, I started with Endo and found the not going to sell anything like that in ventures were really Debray's-are the America, I wouldn't think...

...Playboy...

...soap opera...

...of making the revolution in Latin sayist and polemicist than storyteller...

...do of Buddha...

...self-consciously aware of itself as story, Endo's quiet, unassuming bookment and education I, of course, could more, even, than the gossipy interest of not begin with such flippancy...

...The sweet "They're making a close study of Re- rians...

...But Burgess seems like the kind of Undesirable Alien, inevitably, as Dethe story of Jesus is to marshal a support- fellow who, if he were trying to illustrate bray's attempt to order his own experithe "new freedom" of women religious ing cast of grotesqueries, set the whole ence...

...Paulist, $9.95, 179 pp...

...Hey, do you terizing cliches ("The fact of the matter who thought he could make a whole meal know what they're doing up there in the is that in our day history has become too of a ice cream sundae gopped high with Sierra...

...As if by making something what really comes across in the bookFaced with these two books and being common and ordinary, he can make it more than the chi-chi format of a story old-school Catholic by both tempera- strikingly apparent...

...Such reading has its reward if we would plaster one on the centerfold of troupe on a mammoth stage and have a assume the authority of the narrative...

...As they are caught up in the Commonweal: 574...

...Eleven as to what had exactly happened and who much a part of the reality and mythology years later, Debray is still a better esthis person was growing inside her...