Word: fictioners
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...fiction, as in business, there is always room at the top. Just as South African writers are on the point of becoming a drug on the book market, along comes Cape Towner Uys Krige (44) with a collection of short stories as good as any current in English. They are stories about South Africa that do not. blessedly, derive from the headlines, and war tales that are moving without resorting to war-fiction language and cliches. One or two are complete failures. But the two best ones make it plain that Author Krige is more than promising: 1) The Dream...
Like most successful old fiction pros, Novelist James Street (The Velvet Doublet, The Gauntlet) knows the value of a timely yank at the heartstrings. In his latest, Goodbye, My Lady, the yanking is continuous. His hero is Skeeter, a likable 14-year-old who lives with his illiterate uncle in a shack on the edge of a Mississippi swamp. Life is simple to the point of vacuity-a little huntin', a little fishin', some wood cuttin' when the groceries run low. "Swamp sprout" that he is, Skeeter dreams mostly of a "li'l old" shotgun. Uncle...
...more than a question of manners. There is in much of our early fiction-in Fielding and Smollett, for example-a lot of rough-and-tumble, knockabout brutality, as much a reflection of its time as Hogarth's pictures were. But this new violence, with its sadistic overtones, is quite different. It is not simply coarse, brutal from a want of refinement and nerves, but genuinely corrupt, fundamentally unhealthy and evil. It does not suggest the fairground, the cattle market, the boxing booth, the horseplay of exuberant young males. It smells of concentration camps and the basements of secret...
IMPUNITY JANE, by Rumer Godden (Viking; $2.50), boasts one of the smallest heroines in recent fiction: a four-inch china doll. Impunity, like Ibsen's Nora, rebels against the doll's house, so Author Godden (The River, Black Narcissus) treats her to a high old time as the mascot of a bunch of boys who send her aloft with a toy balloon, spin her on a Catherine wheel and race her across a pond in a toy yacht...
Polish, not Potholes. The Go-Between, a moviemaker's dream, has also been hailed by British critics as one of the best novels to come out of postwar England. Certainly it is one of the most significant, and worth study by anyone who wants to know where English fiction is heading nowadays. No other novel of recent years is a better example of English writing at its contemporary peak of stylized, aristocratic poise-never a flubbed phrase, never a pothole in the smooth course. Author Leslie Poles Hartley, a Harrow-and-Oxford man with six finely finished novels behind...