SHORT STORIES

Press, Volume LXXXIX, Issue 27089, 11 July 1953, Page 3

SHORT STORIES

UNCLE FRED (Dent. 208 pp.) will appeal to all who love rural life and characters; the author, David Smith, has written two other pleasant country books about farming and farmers in his part of England, which is East Anglia. (These were “No Rain in Those Clouds” and “The Same Sky Over All”.) His new book introduces Uncle Fred, a sturdy and lovable farmer, who is the star of a series of huniorous sketches about the lighter side of country life. Highly entertaining and generously illustrated with drawings within the text by Francis Butterfield, it is well suited for winterreading for a farming family—the sort of book that is left lying about for everyone to dip into when they have a spare moment. DON QUIXOTE DROWNED (Macdonald. 248 pp.) by James Hanley, is not. as his readers have come to expect, a strangely compelling novel about sailors and the sea, but a collection of some short sketches of seafaring characters he has known and a longer description of the Welsh town of Llangyllwch, which he has made his home. There are also two other short pieces, “A Writer’s Day’* and “A Ship in the Snow,” a story of the breaking up of an old ship. Hanley is not impressive in this volume, it must be admitted. It is not only that it is fragmentary, but it demonstrates the weaknesses and incoherences in the writer’s mind and the indecisiveness of his attitude to life. His friendly analysis of the Welsh temperament will please Welsh readers and the titlepiece will find its admirers as an unusual study of a perverted character, but otherwise the book is very slight. IN THE ABSENCE OF ANGELS (Heinemann. 223 pp.) is a volume of distinguished short stories by an American writer, Hortense Calisher, one of the “New Yorker” school. She is a serious artist, capable of deep compassion and understanding, with a keen sense of the reality of suffering and its power both to bind and separate human beings. Her analyses of people as individuals or in types and groups are brilliantly clearsighted; and her stories are unusually packed with observation and dramatic interest. In fact, several of them seem to be the germ or beginning of a novel rather than a short story; none can be called slight, and all are well written.