RECENT FICTION
Hayes, E. Nelson
Recent Fiction by E. Nelson Hayes UNDER the blows of military defeat, runaway inflation, and mass unemployment, the German middle-class of the 1920s was re-formed into an instrument of aggressive...
...Of those bitter years immediately following World War I, Erich Remarque has written a new and major novel, the tragicomic The Black Obelisk (Harcourt, Brace...
...he is depicted as the white-man's-burden type whose attitudes and actions are wholly indefensible from a social or a moral viewpoint...
...An angry book by an angry man, this novel about an imaginary island—one not unlike Nicholas Monsarrat's—gives a completely biased and unrealistic picture of the British colonial...
...In The Rapids (Houghton Mifflin...
...The Short Reign of Pippin IV (Viking...
...Birthright by Lettie H. Rogers (Simon and Schuster...
...No one can read Vladimir Nabokov's wonderfully ludicrous extravaganza, Pnin (Doubleday...
...In this respect, it marks an extreme from Remarque's despairing individualism...
...In the last section, in which Plievier shifts his focus and his "hero," he uses the occupation to suggest that the Russians have merely replaced one evil with another, each being essentially the same...
...Hassel seems not to be aware of the split, for while he dedicates every page of the book to the need for a peaceful world, he recounts shameful acts without shame, and even argues for the discipline of totalitarian control in the future to attain peace...
...Berlin (Doubleday...
...Davidson presents each character as a human being compounded of good and evil, yet he also gently pledges himself to the Tightness of the Negro cause...
...319 pp...
...277 pp...
...Through war-time and war-torn Germany, and along the African and Russian fronts went Sven Hassel, a young Dane drafted into the Nazi army in 1940, who served in a penal regiment forced into the most desperate, dangerous action...
...4.50), which itself is illustrative of the manic-depressive mood of Germany in 1923...
...In The Hell Bent Kid (Norton...
...3), Charles O. Locke has intelligently used fate and character to create an unusually adult Western about a young man of gentle heart and deadly rifle...
...Brothers and Sisters by Ivy Compton-Burnett (273 pp...
...272 pp...
...the suicide of a middle-aged man who is not permitted to give land to a Negro...
...Three new novels suggest some of these ingredients...
...Briefly Noted The healthiest, most effective antidote against fanaticism and the other "isms" is humor, especially satire...
...The last days of the Nazi regime and the occupation of eastern Germany by the Russians are dramatically retold in the third of Theodoi...
...3.75) is a tragic tale of incest written in an intense, ironic, almost explosive prose...
...A more bitter, ironic satire was the weapon of Nathaniel West, whose Complete Works (Farrar, Straus and Cudahy...
...3.50), about a refugee professor of Russian in an American college, without loving its eccentric hero and without a renewed faith in the ultimate worth of Everyman...
...Wagner carefully employs sex, liquor, and brutality to reinforce his message of hatred against the old-style imperialist...
...Most of us know his Miss Lonelyhearts about a newspaperman who conducts an ad-vice-to-the-lovelorn column, and The Day of the Locust, probably the best novel yet to be written about Hollywood...
...And Zero Anthology No...
...3) contains seven short stories of sin and sex by one of America's most perceptive young writers, Gore Vidal...
...Writing a quiet, restrained prose, he plots the transformation of an admired, respected "old-timer" who supports the status quo into a reluctant but morally and socially committed advocate of Negro rights and liberties...
...In the first two-thirds of the novel, Plievier has written a script for the Walpurgisnacht during which the Nazis were drowned in the blood bath of Berlin, 1945...
...4.50) is another example of the dehumanizing of the novel through the use of an inanimate object or a series of his-torical events as the "hero," and of the subordination of characters to 1 it...
...3), which author John Steinbeck describes as a "fabrication," relates the ridiculous consequences when a descendant of Charlemagne is made ruler of France in mid-Twentieth Century...
...While technically unsatisfactory, the novel is an honest, courageous, and thoughtful book which transcends the oversimplification too common in fiction of this sort...
...Plievier's novels about cities...
...8 includes excerpts from Sartre's disturbing political satire, Nekrassov, several fine stories by Paul Bowles, Samuel Beckett, and Henri Calet, as well as pieces by lesser known writers...
...A teacher forced to resign because of her support of desegregation...
...So completely was the one side of his nature dominated by Nazi psychology that when he escaped from a Russian prison camp, where life was at least tolerable, he made his way back to the German army, to fight another day...
...434 pp...
...Novels such as these two may do much to help bridge the terrible chasm between the races...
...the self-willed death of their son— through them Miss Rogers analyzes some of the sources of prejudice...
...446 pp...
...We see Hitler and National Socialism as negations of the spirit of life...
...421 pp...
...188 pp...
...Much of the plot is devoted to the primitive theme of individual survival, as the characters daily meet the threat of an inflation which finally devalued the currency to the point where one gold mark was worth a trillion paper ones...
...the grasping greed of a woman who "buys up" the town in order to feed her own ego and prove her superiority to her husband...
...It is an entertaining satire on advertising, witch-hunting, and a dozen other follies and foibles of standardization and conformism...
...3.50) cannot be summed through plot, for it poses the problem of Negro-white relationships in all their complexity...
...Remarque has crowded his novel with improbable events, preposterous circumstances, and much weltschmerz counterpoint-ed against cynical aphorisms...
...5) has been issued in an omnibus volume...
...These are included, along with his juvenile The Dream Life of Balso Snell, a surrealistic fantasy, and A Cool Million...
...219 pp...
...3.50) will contribute much to the need...
...His amateurish The Legion of the Damned (Farrar, Straus and Cudahy...
...While as fiction Bedlam (Putnam...
...If this sort of tactic is wrong for Ruark and Monsarrat, then of course it is equally wrong for Wagner even when we agree with him...
...Recent Fiction by E. Nelson Hayes UNDER the blows of military defeat, runaway inflation, and mass unemployment, the German middle-class of the 1920s was re-formed into an instrument of aggressive hatred and blind irrationality, ready to be whetted by Adolf Hitler...
...3.95) is little more than one monstrous case study after another, it does point up what despite much publicity remains an urgent need not only in France but also in America—a more tolerant, understanding, and helpful attitude toward the mentally ill...
...Each of the many characters appears against a backdrop that suggests Nazism or precarious individualism and death as the future...
...Yet the human spirit of Berlin endures, the men and women of the great city do survive, and Plievier can look to a time when "the moral world and the technical world axe one," when justice, wisdom, courage, truth, honor, and charity will reign...
...In imitation of Hemingway and especially Remarque, here are the organized brutalities of modern warfare, in which a man becomes two beings, the automaton capable of every atrocity and indecency, and the homo sapiens who hates what he does...
...308 pp...
...3.75) is a "documentary novel" which could be more accurately described as embellished autobiography...
...A Thirsty Evil (154 pp...
...It is less certain whether Geoffrey Wagner's Rage on the Bar (Noonday...
...His characters range from the stupid, selfish, arrogant colonist to the fuzzy liberal, and include the half-caste daughter of the hero, who marries a European-educated African who has returned to become the leader of his people...
...Andre Soubiran has tried to match the success of his The Doctors and The Healing Oath with a novel about a sane inmate of an insane asylum...
...181 pp...
...From Zero Press, one of the many small, but vitally important litde publishing firms that still issue experimental works and books of somewhat esoteric appeal, come three especially interesting volumes...
...Wherever there is serious racial conflict, there is also something of the same social and mental condition that made Nazism possible—a rigid class and caste system, a tendency toward mysticism or irrationality, and a strong feeling of aggressiveness...
...Already the stomp of storm troopers is heard in the wings...
...288 pp...
...3.50), Basil Davidson relates the loss of colonial pomp and power in a Portuguese territory in Equatorial Africa...
Vol. 21 • June 1957 • No. 6
