Word: novels
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
BEAU CLOWN, by Berthe Grimault (188 pp.; Rinehart; $3), a crawling compost heap of a novel, accepts as normal and comical the sort of horror about which seamy-side Novelist Louis-Ferdinand Céline wrote with fascination. Author Grimault describes a degenerate clan of French peasants and the flotsam that fetches up at their farm-two prostitutes, four U.S. Negro soldiers foraging for sex, and a netful of AWOL lunatics, including a gently demented old clown and a bloody-nailed slug named Chopper (he is obsessed with decapitation). When Chopper is gored by a huge white bull, a litter...
There is an outguessing game, called "Who gets it next?", which authors of combat novels play with their readers. Will it be the tough sergeant or the hero's buddy who doesn't make it back from his 23rd mission? No such game is played in Wolfgang Ott's grim first novel about the frightful death by bleeding of the German navy during World War II. There is no question of what will happen to his characters; they are all doomed, and who gets it next makes no difference...
...crudities, Novelist Ott has made a case against war that is as powerful as anything in a recent novel. It is also a savage attack on the German people. A young intellectual rants about the complacency that allowed Hitler's rise: "We have outstanding religious leaders and brilliant philosophers; we have gifted musicians and soldiers; we have smart bankers and remarkable whoremas-ters; we have everything-except human beings." Lieut. Teichmann agrees half-heartedly with the half-truths, then changes his mind, protests that there is some meaning, at least, in fighting courageously...
...Author Grimault, herself a French farm girl, groups her rush of words well in short, clear sentences. Despite the repulsive midden from her imagination, there is a kind of dirty-faced innocence about the book, and an undeniable storytelling ability. Half-illiterate when she wrote the novel, Berthe Grimault had help from a village postmaster who barbered the grammar, laundered the sex. Currently, a proper laundering is in process: at the Grove, a British finishing school, the staff is trying to get Berthe to behave as if she were less familiar with country matters...
STRANGE EVIL, by Jane Gaskell (256 pp.; Dutton; $3.50), is a saner but less fascinating novel. It reads a little as if Alice had blundered into the court of Pierre Louÿs instead of the Red Queen. The book abounds in bare-breasted courtesans and tall, flashing-eyed men, many of them wicked. Most of the action, described in lavender prose, takes place in fairyland, which is reached by springing lightly off Notre Dame de Paris. The heroine, for reasons probably most obvious to a 14-year-old girl bent on writing a naughty novel, is a nude model...