WORTH WHILE BOOKS

Manawatu Standard, Volume L, Issue 106, 1 April 1930, Page 2

WORTH WHILE BOOKS

“TRAVELS IN THE CONGO” Translations of Andre Gide already known in the Dominion are “The Counterfeiters” and “Lafcadio’s Adventures.” Tho third translation of the work of this foremost French prose writer of Huguenot ancestry is a rare record entitled “Travels in the Congo.” It is dedicated to the memory of Joseph Conrad, who penetrated Central Africa in 1890 and whose book “Heart of Darkness,” M. Gide refers to as “admirable and cruelly exact.” “Travels in the Congo” is not one of those monotonous, romantically-distorted records that in past years havo flooded tho literary market j it is not a work that one reads superficially, for the stylo is a mixture of conciseness and descriptive melody, and its attraction is strong. It is a lengthy volume, yet the busy reader may take it in stages, and what interesting, speculative stages! With his unusual literary power, his fine description and diction M. Gide gives one astonishing vistas of eerie twilights, columns of trees soaring to dizzy heights, great silences, or forests filled with uncanny noises. And yet again, pen pictures of monotonous and dreary stretches, and of heavy, steaming air bathing one in perspiration. But M. Gide says of tho more pleasant side: “The forest closes in here and becomes still more enchanting; there is water everywhere and the road, which is laid on piles, is constantly crossed by little wooden bridges. Here at last there wero some flowers—mauve balsams and other flowers that reminded me of Normandy epilobes. I cannot describe my rapture and excitement as I walked on (not suspecting, alas, that we should never see anything so beautiful again). Oh! if one could only have stopped. . . . ! So man}' more descriptive passages bound, balanced by tho occasional abruptness of an uninteresting day spent in a tipoye, for “nothing is more fatiguing than this form of' looomotion, when tho tipoyeurs are not thoroughly trained. It shakes one like the trot of a bad horse.” And there are pictures of landscapes without nobility, or of desert-like perfection, or villages fantastic by moonlight, with friendly inhabitants, or villages with huts resembling animals’ dens and dull, apathetic stares greeting tho travellers’ passing. There is also this passage: “What I cannot describe is the beautiful expression or these peoples’ eyes, the touching intonation of their voices, the dignity and reserve of their bearing the noble elegance of their gestures. Beside these blacks, how many white men would look "like vulgar cads!” And so on through this engrossing work of a prose master who ranks with Galsworthy - and Thomas Mann (the German winner of the Nobel Prize) and who among living French men of letters is coupled with the name of Marcel Proust. M. Gide has written a very remarkable work on the life, customs, rituals, morality—frank, but inoffensive—of the natives of a land of novel vegetation, amazing butterflies, and sunsets and sunrises never captured on canvas—a land where beauty and death abound. It is an unprejudiced story of travel through interminable forests of dark, monotonous green, or “bare spaces covered with dried grass and a curious alternation of trees, game in abundanco and incredible numbers of crocodiles on the mudbanks, mud-and-bug coloured.” There is no propaganda, no history of an Empire pathway, no praise of French or Belgian colonisation. It is a strangely vivid account of a" wonderful country. A page before the author ended his record on a whimsical note he penned the following: “This is the last day. Our journey is over. Perhaps I shall never see the virgin forest again. Oh! if I could see it again, if only for a moment. . . ! It is one of the outstanding literary works of the present day, and illustrated with the various native types and scenes the author encountered "in a land where, to use his own words, lie mostly found forgetfulness and happiness. “Travels in the Congo” is published by Alfred A. Knopf, London, and is on sale at Messrs G. H. Bennett and Co., Ltd. Broadway, Palmerston North.