Word: plievier
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Moscow (318 pp.)−Theodor Plievier−Doubleday...
...WORLD'S LAST CORNER (295 pp.)-Theodor Plievier-Appleton-Century-Crofts...
...Stalingrad (TIME, Nov. 1, 1948), Theodor Plievier, German novelist, wrote what still remains the most powerful novel of World War II. Leaning on that fact, his U.S. publishers have now issued an "adaptation" of two earlier Plievier novels written in the '30s, and called it The World's Last Corner. The stories, clumsily adapted, add nothing to the reputation of the man who wrote Stalingrad, but they have several lively moments, and show something of what Plievier was up to before the Wehrmacht rolled into Russia...
Part Two of Plievier's story picks up Wenzel, again flat broke, in another South American port. He wanders into the waterfront dive run by Milly, a "shark" who helps shanghai drunken sailors into freighter crews. Wenzel's young face and smooth muscles soften Milly's heart; as she liquors up a crew for a wretched guano ship, she decides to save him for herself. But Wenzel refuses the favor and takes his place with his tricked and sodden buddies...
...Last Corner are incidental: scenes of illegal night fishing with dynamite, a Sunday dinner at the Caleta Colosal Hotel, the all-night "party" from which Milly gets her crew. As a story of sailors on the beach, the book is entirely convincing, but as the social parable for which Plievier was aiming it does not come off. Hero Wenzel is simply too dull for the conclusions Plievier puts in his mouth...