RECENT FICTION
Hayes, E. Nelson
Recent Fiction By E. NELSON HAYES SERIOUS historical fiction often illustrates, even if unintentionally, Arnold Toynbee's thesis of chal-lenge-and-response, of harsh circumstances making or...
...214 pp...
...4.50), a collection of twenty-five tales written during as many years, represents his best work in this format...
...234 pp...
...3.95) by Canadian-born Adele Wiseman, who is now a resident of London, is an ironic, sometimes obscure, yet moving and dramatic parallel to the story of Abraham in the Old Testament...
...This tale of two men and a woman in Africa is, in one sense, a man's testament of his deterioration, of his failure to transcend himself except in a brief love affair which because adulterous is also sinful and doomed...
...Each of the stories is a bitter, anguished account of sexual anxiety and pain...
...Miss Settle has written an exciting and rewarding novel without stooping to any of the blood-and-sex crudities of most historical fiction...
...Here we watch the often heart-breaking but ultimately triumphant success of two men and a woman to continue publishing a New York newspaper during the Revolution...
...it is arty and artful rather than artistic, is cinematographic in its coy simplicity of plot, characterization, and description, and is quite unworthy of the acclaim it has received both in Japan and here...
...3.50) is perhaps not, in the ordinary meaning of the term, an historical novel...
...3.95) is a considerably less mature novel, although it is equally distinguished by honesty and conviction...
...Mamba by Stuart Cloete (Houghton, Mifflin...
...The Green Mare, by Marcel Ayme (Harper...
...346 pp...
...3), which appeared in the movie version as "The Game of Love," reveals again that amazing sensitivity to matters of love which characterize all of Colette's novels...
...The Sacrifice (Viking...
...This is a bitter-sweet novel, close to the soil ' which is our sustenance, and to the faintest echoes of the despairing heart...
...V. S. Pritchett, the brilliant and provocative English literary critic, has remarked that in this "nervous and restless age" we tend to see the world in fragments rather than as a whole, and that therefore the short story is more suitable to our moods and views than is the novel...
...From Japan comes one of the slickest performances of the year...
...3.95) she forcefully and realistically fuses a tale of struggle with the wilderness with the stormy passions of a young immigrant couple and their daughter...
...Skillfully shifting scene from London to the Tidewater to the wilderness, and using many techniques of the modern novel rather than relying entirely on a straightforward narrative, she gives a wholly convincing picture of the challenge of primitive living, of Indian warfare, of men and women cut off from the sustaining structures and habits of civilization, in a rich land where the strong must carry the weak and destroy the wicked...
...Peggy Simson Curry sees yet another challenge-and-response in the settling of the high cattle country in the Colorado Rockies...
...The Sound of Waves by Yukio Mishima (Knopf...
...3) is a Daphnis-Chloe love story which culminates in the declaration that "the only thing that really counts in a man is his get-up-and-go...
...344 pp...
...It is a little masterpiece in which futility becomes a tragic cry that makes most existentialist literature seem weak by comparison...
...But first of all, it is superb fiction, a tactile novel which makes the skin crawl, the fingers twitch, the whole body respond to the beauty and terror which Cloete «o magnificently describes...
...In another sense, it is an allegory of man's eternal struggle against the evil of his animal nature...
...Miss Wiseman, although she handles her symbols unsurely, writes with a wisdom and humor, and with a maturity of style and characterization which might well be envied by a more experienced novelist...
...247 pp...
...He finds "drama in human personality, in character rather than in events," and these stories are revelations of oddities, quirks, and small passions expressed in admirable manner if without dramatic force...
...The harvest of novels from abroad continues, not infrequently to the detriment of an American literature, which still seems not to have hit its stride since the war...
...368 pp...
...Bitter Honeymoon and Other Stories by Alberto Moravia (Farrar, Straus and Cudahy...
...3) is certainly best described in the author's note: "This is the story of the struggle of a man against the forces of evil which drive him, and those of good which inspire him...
...The Sailor, Sense of Humour, and Other Stories (Knopf...
...377 pp...
...183 pp...
...Farrar, Straus and Cudahy have published another volume in their projected complete works of Colette...
...of a God-woman concept...
...The Red Room (Farrar, Straus and Cudahy...
...3.50) is a Flemish study of the stifling of the natural impulses of love by a young girl determined on protecting herself against hurt and humiliation...
...The Narrow Covering by Julia Siebel (Harcourt, Brace...
...Finally, for some delightful Gallic earthiness and irony, there is the fantasy...
...of a search for truth and beauty in the confusion of today, where there is no precedent...
...In So Far From Spring (Viking...
...The novel represents a sharp break from the traditional Japanese literature, and indicates a strong and unfortunate influence from the Occident...
...3.95) Mary Lee Settle presents a vigorously imagined and thoughtfully planned story of the settling of West Virginia in the Eighteenth Century...
...Recent Fiction By E. NELSON HAYES SERIOUS historical fiction often illustrates, even if unintentionally, Arnold Toynbee's thesis of chal-lenge-and-response, of harsh circumstances making or breaking character...
...The Ripening Seed (186 pp...
...The Long Watch by Elisabeth Lin-ington (Viking...
...Although it does concern a small prairie town in Kansas from 1914 to after World War II, as de-pressingly and then desperately seen through the eyes of a woman too weak to accept the inevitable cycle of life and death, of joy and sorrow, which is the human condition...
...In O Beulah Land (Viking...
...369 pp...
...221 pp...
...232 pp...
...One of them gives a particularly fine statement of,the rereponsibility of the press: "It behooves til who have aught to do with anything in print to make certain that the heresies they preach are healthy ones, the learning truthful learning, and the disobedience righteous disobedience...
...In this modern version the father of a refugee family that has found a home in Canada unwittingly sacrifices his loved ones to God and to the traditions and practices of a way of life that does not easily fit into the pattern of a Twentieth Century metropolis...
...3.50) is something of a disappointment when compared with his novels...
Vol. 20 • October 1956 • No. 10
