Teen-Age Flaubert

AWAKENING (244 pp.]--Jean-Baptiste Rossi--Harper ($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 youngster's writing ability and his literary good taste.

When the book was published in England as The False Start, the critics dusted off some of their most generous phrases. The New Statesman and Nation called it a "limpid and exquisite love story"; The Recorder suggested that young Rossi might grow up to become "another Flaubert." Young Jean's little novel has now been published in the U.S. under the title Awakening, and, while it seems to have been a bit overrated, it is at least a remarkable book for a teen-age author.

Love Instead of Latin. Sister Clothilde was 28 and had never been kissed, but she was beautiful and well-made. The boy Denis, going on 14, met her when he ran an errand to the local hospital. He felt glowingly attracted to the smiling sister and invented excuses to see her again. Soon the thought of the handsome Denis was invading Sister Clothilde's prayers. She tried to reassure herself: "I love him as a son. There is nothing else. I love him as a mother loves her son." But she had misunderstood her feelings as completely as Denis had at first misunderstood his own. One day, kneeling beside him in a church, she could not help putting her arms around him. Soon, on the pretext of coming to Sister Clothilde for Latin lessons, Denis was making love to her.

Denis went to confession, but confession had become meaningless. To himself he said: "God is dead. There is no one else but us." It was wartime, and when their town in occupied France was bombed, Sister Clothilde went to her family's house in the country. Denis' unsuspecting parents were glad to have him go to a safe place with her.

Pathetic Idyl. It took the crafty peasants to discover their little idyl, and soon the whole pathetic story was out. Sister Clothilde left her order, Denis was hustled off to school. Both knew that they had made a false start; both believed that they belonged together and would some day meet again. Shrewd young Author Rossi makes no promises.

Awakening may seem a shocker, especially to Catholics, but it is no dirty-minded, adolescent scrawl. Rossi, a precocious youngster who was himself kicked out of a Jesuit school at 14, sometimes makes hero Denis sound and feel older than his years. Occasionally both author and hero show their immaturity in awkward, self-conscious yammerings about life. But as a picture of an adolescent agonizingly in love, or even as a simple love story, Awakening is done with enough skill and taste to establish Author Rossi as the Flaubert of teenagers.

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