The Bad Shepherd

THE SIN OF FATHER AMARO (352 pp.) --fco de Queiroz--S/. Morl/n's ($5.95).

When young Father Amaro arrives at his new post in the cathedral town of Leiria, he finds Father Dias, his old mentor from seminary days, snugly ensconced with a plump middle-aged mistress. The local abbot, a famous chef and gourmet, delivers sermons on such worldly topics as how to prepare sarrabulhos--a Portuguese delicacy concocted from pig's blood and giblets. Worldliness is a communi-cabla disease. Soon Father Amaro is successfully pursuing Amelia, the beautiful daughter of his new landlady.

Love of God and lust soon become hopelessly intermingled. Because Amaro is her spiritual guide as well as her lover, Amelia comes to exist in a kind of circu lar spiritual slavery. "Her judgments now came already formed from the priest's brain . . . She lived with her eyes on him in animal obedience; all she had to do was bow her head when he spoke and when the moment came, let down her skirts."

Profoundly blasphemous, searingly angry, Ega de Queiroz' chronicle of the tragedy that follows is at once a chilling morality tale and a corrosive indictment of the priest-ridden society of Portugal in the 1860s. The book was written in 1871, but Queiroz had his troubles getting it published. After it finally appeared in 1874, it was inevitably put on the Index. But by the time Queiroz, a patrician career diplomat as well as author, died in 1900, he was recognized not only as Portugal's first realistic novelist but his country's greatest writer of prose. Widely praised and known in Europe for half a century, Amaro is now available in the U.S. for the first time.

Today, Queiroz' controversial work seems too gothic in spots: at the book's close, for example, Amelia dies in childbirth, and Amaro arranges to have the baby murdered by an obliging nurse. Yet Queiroz is a prose master whose message wears better than most 19th century literary reformers. He is not simple-minded enough to believe that Rome is the root of all evil. His churchmen are protected by organized ecclesiastical hypocrisy, but their depravity is all their own. Queiroz' ultimate target is no single human institution but human nature itself.

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