NEW NOVELS

Press, Volume LXXXV, Issue 25953, 5 November 1949, Page 3

NEW NOVELS

Reviewed by H.L.G.

ZEST IN ITALY A Summer in Italy. By Sean O’Faolain. Eyre and Spottiswoode. 234 PPThe Italian people, more than all others, know how to live, and in this sympathetic account of them a famous Irish writer puts his finger on many of their most fascinating qualities. He was a casual, not a systematic or conventional traveller, staying or moving on as the spirit took him, idling and talking to the people, really getting the feel of Italy. As he says, ‘you can only enjoy Italy when the monuments are off your conscience.” He describes the funeral of some children in Verona, with scenes of hysterical emotion, a wine-fair at Siena, and the famous Palio, or horse-race, of the same city, a wildly exciting event, the peculiar humour of the Florentines, the narrow twisting maze of the slums of Genoa. He has as much zest for living as the Italians themselves, and is an excellent writer; the whole combination makes an irresistible book.

WILD WEST

Red Indian Experiences. By De Cost Smitii. Allen and Unwin. 387 pp. The author of this remarkable book is a writer, artist, and man of action, and an authority on the North American Indian. He lived a great part of his life among the Indians at the end of the last century, in the days of the great Sioux chiefs, of whom Sitting Bull was the most famous. He writes an authentic and colourful account of the West when it was still wild, and gives an interesting picture of the Indians, their dances, their ‘medicine,’ their folk-lore, and their heroic resistance to the white man’s advance (their independence being finally broken only by alcohol, smallpox, and the extinction of the buffalo herds). His descriptions of some of the natural phenomena of the West, such as the mirages in the desert regions of Idaho and Wyoming, and the South Dakota-Bad-lands, are also of interest. The book is profusely illustrated with photographs and drawings by the author, and some reproductions of Indian art.

TOO MUCH

Peace—ls E Impossible? By Pelham Burn. With a Foreword by Dr. Stoyan Gavrilovic. Century Press Ltd. 236 pp.« This is a ponderous commentary on international affairs, the United Nations, and the possibility of world government. The author has tried to make his work lively by couching it in the form of conversations between three people, but the people do not come alive and the conversations are so wooden that the whole effect is even more stodgy than it would otherwise have been. Some of the conversations are a tissue of actual quotations from speeches made at various United Nations conferences. The author belongs to the school of thought which propounds the common fallacy that all the world’s problems will be solved if we just get our national representatives together round a table and have them discuss their little disagreements, and define their objects and draw up a charter or two. Though a sincere and well-meaning man, he has little sense of reality and little ability to reason closely. There is one quaint orthographic affectation in this book; no capitals are used for adjectives denoting nationality; “british.” “french,” and “austrian” look, ridiculous enough, but “the finnish minister” is really too much!

BURLESQUE

The Memoirs of a Shy Pornographer. By Kenneth Patchen, Grey Walls Press. 235 pp.

Written by America’s best known younger poet, this novel is a burlesque satire on contemporary American society, particularly on the methods of building literary reputations, and on the more decadent and “sophisticated” sides of American life. Set in the midst of the hurly-burly is a simple soul, the middle-aged hero, whose reactions are' innocent and straightforward. After a life so commonplace that he hardly knows what to record of it (‘T have worn out 361 pairs of socks, 46 of pants, 83 of shorts, 35 of shoes, 102 shirts. . . .”), he writes a perfectly harmless book which is taken up by an agent, printed out of the country in a suspicious-looking cover, with a lot of asterisks inserted, and sells like hot-cakes as pornography; the surprised author is suddenly catapulted into money, and fame among a degenerate circle. The novel is written in an original and experimental style, which owes much to surrealism, the cinema and the radio. The gusto and the brilliant wit often remind the reader of James Joyce—and also, occasionally, the obscurity of reference. (The title of one chapter is: “Does the Famous Detective Know that Love in a Mist is only the Great White Whale Going Down for the Full Count in that Old Seventh Round?”)

ORIENT IN FOCUS

Mr Sampath. By R. K. Narayan. Eyre & Spottiswoode. 219 pp. Mr Narayan is a distinguished Indian author who has won a considerable reputation already with his novels. “The English Teacher” and “The Bachelor of Arts.” Like these earlier novels, the present book is set in the little town of Malgudi, which is depicted with beautiful clarity. We are conscious at all times that this is not our world, and that all the characters are different from people we have known, but as a critic has said, Mr Narayan is a writer “who can place the Orient into focus for Occidental eyes,” and we quickly become as familiar with the town as if we had known It ourselves. He writes of a thoughtful Indian newspaper editor, and his energetic printer, Mr Sampath, and many other vivid characters, with a peculiar and charming combination of gravity and humour quite unusual in a European writer.

EDINBURGH LIFE

A Clear Dawn. By Winifred Peck. Faber & Faber. 253 pp.

Lady Peck is well known for several successful novels about the upper classes. In this novel, possibly her best, she writes about a lowermiddle class family in Edinburgh, and shows the great gifts of human sympathy, shrewd observation —although

in a different sphere—and excellent narrative sense which distinguished her earlier work. Like many English novelists, she is concerned with the exposure of snobbery, and makes the most of the dramatic human situations caused by the juxtaposition of selfish, superficial and posturing people with people who are honest, natural and dignified. She creates really threedimensional characters, and the whole novel has a solid feel of life about it.