AWAKENING (244 pp.]Jean-Baptiste RossiHarper ($3).
Each year the French award all manner of writing prizes, but they give none for pure precocity. If they did, the 1950 prize would certainly have gone to a 19-year-old boy from Marseilles named Jean-Baptiste Rossi. In that year, he published a novel he had written at the age of 16 which most parents of 16-year-olds would scarcely want their children to read: the story of a love affair between a teen-age boy and a Roman Catholic nun. What startled critics almost as much as the subject was the...
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