Death Comes for the Archbishop
In 1851 a young French priest rides north from Durango into a new vicariate the size of a country, where Mexican parishes have gone forty years without a bishop and two of his own clergy hold their villages by force. Jean Marie Latour and his boyhood friend Joseph Vaillant spend their lives on horseback among Navajo, Hopi and Mexican congregations, and the book advances not by plot but by episodes told in the flat, even light of a saint's legend. Willa Cather took the two priests from Howlett's life of Bishop Machebeuf, and said she wanted the manner of the Sainte Geneviève frescoes, where a martyrdom weighs no more than a journey.
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Archetype (Jung / Campbell)
Quest object (Greimas)
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Closest analogues
- 50% · 11 shared
- 45% · 12 shared
- 45% · 11 shared
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- 41% · 11 shared