Word: authority
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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When Belgian-born Author José André Lacour outlined his Death in That Garden, he found himself at a writer's disadvantage. The setting was the upper reaches of Amazonia, but Lacour had never been there. So he left his home near Paris and spent three months in Brazil; including ten days on the Amazon-though quite comfortably on a friend's yacht. When his novel was published, one French critic flatly hailed it as "one of the masterworks of his generation." It is not that, but it is still one of the grimmest stories in some...
This is obviously the kind of fertile fictional earth just right for the tall corn. To Author Lacour's credit, he does not overcultivate the acres. When Chark, the German, tells them of his plan to search for a gold-carrying plane that has crashed, all agree to stick together. Ridiculously ill-equipped, they begin a journey whose terrors bring out the best and worst in them all. Starving, sick, half-crazed, they stumble along after the German, take turns carrying the child and the box of crucifixes that the priest intends for native Indians. The ceaseless procession...
Barzun invites all "genuine intellectuals" to take arms against the "liberal" teachers'-college products who have "a special language, a flatulent Newspeak, which combines self-righteousness with permanent fog . . ." In a sonorous exhortation, Author Barzun invites readers to remember that spelling and adding-the alphabet and mathematics-are the foundations of all learning and reason, and that the U.S. shakes them at its peril...
Flawed and fragile early novels are often like youthful snapshots: a source of faint discomfort to the author, a delight to the doting fan, and a revealing glimpse into the past. Two such novels have now been issued in the U.S., one by Nancy Mitford, the British author (Love in a Cold Climate) who hates Americans, and the other by Christopher Isherwood, the British author (Prater Violet) who became one. The first is worth noting because of the surprisingly naive notions of its adult author, the second because it marks the jumping-off point in a talented young writer...
Medals & Marks. Nancy Mitford's Pigeon Pie (British Book Centre; 186 pp.; $2.95) was first published in 1940, and shows it. The book is a gay little farce about the early days of the war, and to Author Mitford, in that innocent year, war was something tiresome that men did. She wrote merrily: "England picked up France, Germany picked up Italy. Then Italy's Nanny said she had fallen down and grazed her knee, running, and mustn't play. England picked up Turkey, Germany picked up Spain, but Spain's Nanny said she had internal troubles...