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Mario Pomilio was a novelist, editor, and literary
critic, releasing 8 novels, a book of short stories, and various
books of criticism over his career.
The Fifth Gospel is Pomilio’s most
important work; it marks the culmination of the complex thematic
evolution of his work as a whole. It was originally
published in Italy in 1975 and won the Napoli Prize and the Maria
Cristina Prize. Umberto C. Mariani and Alice J. Mariani have
translated it into English for the first time.
While for Mario Pomilio the essential condition of man
in our time is markedly our solitude, our alienation, and our sense
of having lost control of both the physical universe and of human
history (even as science and technology assure us we are gaining
it), The Fifth Gospel tells
the story of a search for a message of hope and salvation that is
presented as realizable. Although the search almost always ends
tragically, it is constantly reborn; if its failure can be cause
for alienation and despair, its constant revival throughout the
centuries is a harbinger of hope.
Introduction
A Letter
The Vivario Manuscript
The Chart of Heaven
The Legends
The Greek Monk
The Reappearances
The Green Branch
The Gospel of the Popes
The Story of Friar Michele, A
Minorite
The Banquet of Lyons
The Christ of Guardia
The Profession of Faith of Pierre
D’Artois
The Life of the Chevalier Du Breuil
The Justification of the Priest Domenico De
Lellis
Letters from My Former Students
A Reply to a Replay
The Fifth Evangelist
Praise for the Italian Edition:
This book is about the life of the word
that has run through the veins of our civilization for more
than twenty centuries, a lively, absorbing book, that narrates the
twice-millennial and still unachieved—therefore most timely—quest
for this deepest truth of mankind. All intelligent readers,
Christian or not, but sensitive to the development of our
civilization, will read this great book with pleasure and joy. . .
. Pomilio has obviously not tried to write the fifth gospel, he has
marvelously explored its absence.
The Fifth Gospel makes poetry of a story so incredible and so true that the questions posed to truth across the centuries burn more and more intensely, until the author himself seems to feel the anguish of his protagonist.
Mario Pomilio was an author,
editor, and literary critic. He was born in 1921 in Orsogna, Italy,
and passed away in 1990.
Umberto C. Mariani is professor
emeritus in the Italian Department at Rutgers
University.
Alice J. Mariani, also retired,
holds a PhD in comparative literature from Yale
University.