HispanicVista Columnists
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The Sudarium Trilogy”
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By
Sal Osio, JD - From the Publisher's Corner
- Mi Punto de Vista
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- Book
Review
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The Sudarium Trilogy”
- By Sal
Osio, JD – Publisher
The Sudarium Trilogy” – a religious historical
thriller with a science fiction theme, not unlike Dan Brown’s “The Da
Vinci Code” - authored by Leonard Foglia and David Richards, translated
in Spanish for its initial publication in
Why is an English language masterpiece authored by
Americans published abroad successfully instead of making its debut at
home, in the
A disturbing explanation is that in the absence of sensationalism, trendy gossip and scandal or titillating sex, Americans no longer read books, that is to say for the sake of literature.
Their pass time is the computer, the Internet, the smart phone and computer games. Readership is down alarmingly from the beginning of the millennium. Book stores are disappearing, Border’s being the most recent casualty. Literary agents, editors and publishers have seen their ranks decimated. Less than 5% of the news media have a book review department. The only viable alternative today is ‘e-books’ – electronic publishing.
As a result, “The Sudarium Trilogy” in
The trilogy is more than a historical religious thriller along the lines of “The Da Vinci Code” and the underlying thesis, human cloning, is no longer a Stephen King science fiction thriller. Cell stem science has established that animal cloning is achievable. Humans are members of the animal species.
Humans are ‘cloneable.’ So it is not beyond reality that given a sample of Christ’s blood, His DNA, which was surreptitiously stolen from the ‘Sudarium,’ the cloth bearing Christ’s facial imprint at the Cross, could be implanted surgically in a human embryo, giving birth to a human clone of Jesus Christ.
Were that to happen, the biblical ‘Second Coming’ would cause a world stir in Christendom unlike any other tempest in history. This is the provocative hypothesis of the trilogy. From Book One – “The Surrogate,” the novel continues the suspenseful journey to Book Two – “The Son” and concludes with the dramatic ending in Book Three – “The Savior.”
The story line is about a surrogate mother who gives birth to a clone of Christ engineered by a group of quasi religious fanatics desiring to gain the power attendant to the ‘second coming.’ This conspiracy is countered by the established Catholic religious right, including the Holy See, who fears an undermining of their vested power. Caught in the middle of this suspenseful drama are our hero, Mano, and his family.
Mano’s struggle for self identification and realization – is he the clone of Christ? - is a spiritual quest that overrides the suspense itself as his life is in constant danger. His spiritual odyssey is a philosophical treatise that seeks a definition of life and death. Due to the depth of spiritual analysis the authors elevate their novel to the higher plateau of man’s search within himself for a meaning to life. One could easily conclude that the trilogy is a theological thesis and Mano’s adventure but an allegory.
For me the novel was a pleasure to read for the additional reason that the authors have a scholastic command of our language. We are seldom treated to prose and poetry and are held captive by authors who butcher the language in an attempt to identify with ‘reality’ – slang, vernacular idioms and expletives embellished with sexual content.
Foglia and Richards reward us with a rich vocabulary and figures of speech – an art form which has all but disappeared in modern literature. Their tasteful adoption of similes, metaphors, allegories and oxymoron combined with hyperbole, irony, understatement with a touch of sarcasm enriches our reading pleasure and joy in the art of literature – the art of expression and articulation – which maximizes our interest in the suspenseful thriller and intellectually challenging thesis.
Our subscribers to HVC (www.HispanicVista.com)
will be more motivated to read the trilogy since it draws on the fusion
of Christianity and the Hispanic culture, the very fabric of our
traditions, and since the dominant landscape of the adventure is set in