Word: novels
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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When the Atlantic Monthly held its first prize novel contest 23 years ago, a flood of 1,150 manuscripts engulfed the editorial staff; extra readers were hired to weed out the hopeless entries. Into the rejects went a manuscript titled Jalna, written by a Canadian woman named Mazo de la Roche. Its handsome binding caught the eye of one of the Atlantic's regular editors. He picked the manuscript out of the discard, glanced at it and did not stop reading until he had finished it. Jalna won the contest's $10,000 first prize...
Last week, Author de la Roche and the saga of Jalna, a mythical 19th Century estate in southern Ontario, were still making literary news. Mary Wake field (Atlantic-Little, Brown; $3), Miss de la Roche's eleventh novel of the Jalna series, was published in the U.S. The Literary Guild chose it as the Guild selection for February (for March in Canada) and expected Mary Wakefield to sell 500,000 copies. That would push the sales of Miss de la Roche's novels (now translated into a dozen languages) near the two-million mark...
...wheel in this novel civilization is a slinky siren named Antinea (Maria Montez). When a couple of the Foreign Legion boys (Jean Pierre Aumont and Dennis O'Keefe) blunder into her boudoir cooking for a missing French archeologist (he shows up eventually, tidily gold-leafed in the Visitors' Gallery), she plays them off against each other. Then she plays both off against the old embalming fluid...
Such an uneasy fugitive from catastrophe is Shmul Weinstock, hero of London physician Alex Comfort's tight little novel, On This Side Nothing. In dry, sparse sentences Weinstock tells the story of his return to his native North African city the night before its ghetto is cordoned off by the Germans. His narrative, laconic and unsentimental, suggests the quality of life during a war: its urgency and tension, its underside of absurdity...
...ankles, with her pretty thighs exposed, by her brutal nobleman husband whom she has been forced to marry, is beaten by him with a cudgel "not thicker than a man's thumb," and is kidnaped by Indians. This, presumably, is what readers of this kind of novel have been waiting for, but it is a long wait, and they are in for further dull stretches before virtue and justice at last prevail...