PUBLIC LIBRARIES

Evening Post, Volume CXIX, Issue 104, 4 May 1935, Page 34

PUBLIC LIBRARIES

BOOKS OF THE WEEK

The Chief Librarian .of the Wellington Public Libraries has chosen "Time's Door," by Esther Meynell, as the book of the week, and has furnished the following review.—

Mrs. Meynell has been most successful in taking a cross section of the past and presenting it with an air of conviction. Giovanni Cavatini is the son of an Italian violinist who had been stricken with madness after hearing the playing of Paganini. His mother's father has been a professor of music at Leipzig, and the background about Giovanni when he was born at the beginning of last century in Rome was definitely a musical one. He is lucky enough to be taken as a pupil of Paganini himself, and accompanies the maestro over Europe. The legacy from his father, a great treasure, is a collection of letters written by one of Giovanni's own ancestors, who years before had been a pupil of Bach. He had been intimate with the great musician, and his letters had revealed close contact with his household. Giovanni becomes so familiar with these letters when living in Leipzig that he discovers that he can sometimes project his mind back as it were into his ancestor's body and see the great master sitting .in his.study with his daughter Catherina at his side. Almost, for the time being, he- is his young ancestor, so deeply does he enter into this earlier existence. He is able to see how. Catherina Bach loved his dead forbear, and he is able to appreciate the point his ancestor had missed. None the less the miraculous and far-fetched element, a small part of the story and not so far divorced from probability, is only subsidiary in a most attractive novel. The musical atmosphere of Leipzig and the curious personages who go to make up the musical society there all go to build up a story which centres round the greatness of the old musician Bach. There are scenes in the German countryside when Giovanni goes on a walking tour with Amades Govini, a young Italian pianist, which can only be a result of a knowledge of that country, as it is today. Gobbo, a dog, accompanies them on this tour and again later on a concert tour. The original musical influence in Giovanni's life has been the wildness of Paganini's music, but he progresses through a kind of self education in music to an understanding of profounder and more significant things which he begins to understand partly as the result of his contacts with other people in the musical world of his time.

There *has been something of a vogue of recent years in books dealing with the occult, ' and with the strengthening conviction that there are more things in heaven and earth than our forefathers, dreamed of the modern reader is a little more loath to decry anything touching on the supernatural than he was a generation or two ago. Wildness and improbability will definitely rule out a certain number of books, but an element of unsuspected mental powers such as those described in this book has come to be taken as no more than a statemerit of what can be a very reasonable belief. The sensation which Mrs. Meynell describes is after all no more than a repetition of what everyone has felt at some time or another, a fleeting and half acknowledged remembrance of having done the same thing before at .some earlier time which could not possibly be identified Whether disputed or not, this is a common enough' experience, and upon it Mrs. Meynell has built an edifice which, however, is strong enough to stand without that foundation. RECENT LIBRARY ADDITIONS. Other titles selected from recent accession lists are as follows:—General: "Recollections of my Youth," by E. Renan; "The Court-martial of the Bounty Mutineers," edited by O. Rutter; "A Great-niece's Journals," edited by M..S. Roult; "The Story of my Life," by Marie, Queen of Rumania; "Limey Breaks In," by J. Spencer; "Investigations in Occultism," by R. Steiner"Whither Asia," by K. J. Saunders! Fiction: "The' Crowned Lovers," by E Barrington; "The Orange Yellow Diamond," by J. S. Fletcher; ."The Elusive Bachelor," by F. E. Penny "Divorced £° m Reality," by D. E. Stevenson; *?*. stefan>" by P. Wentworth; Pillion," by C. Hamilton; "Louise of Leadenhall Street," by G". C. FosterCastle in Andalusia," by E. Spregge'