Word: ruesch
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...Woman of Means, Peter Taylor wrote a mature and modest first book about a difficult boy-stepmother relationship. Hans Ruesch tried an offbeat background and brought off a vivid story of Eskimo manners & morals in Top of the World. Most polished of the preciousness school novels was A Long Day's Dying, by Frederick Buechner, a 23-year-old disciple of Henry James. There was nothing precious about young (24) John Hawkes's The Cannibal, a sometimes powerful experimental novel that tried to capture the nightmarish quality of Germany's disintegration in defeat. The Harper Prize...
...World, by Hans Ruesch. A sketchy but fresh-faced novel about Eskimo life in the Canadian Arctic, in which the Eskimos get along just fine with their folkways until the white men barge in (TIME...
...this region," writes Ruesch, "all life was exclusively carnivorous. Bear was man's biggest prize. Man was bear's biggest prize. Here it had not yet been decided whether man or bear was the crown of creation." But polar man knew a pretty sure way to kill polar bear. After spotting his game, he hid a tightly coiled splint of whalebone in a ball of blubber, froze it intact, and bowled it across the snow to the bear. After a few suspicious licks, the hungry bear usually gulped it down. Soon the blubber melted, releasing the coiled splint...
Frozen Grandmothers. When parts of his episodic novel appeared in U.S. magazines, so many incredulous readers wrote letters to Author Hans Ruesch that he decided to forestall further inquiries with a prefatory note: "I now wish to state beforehand that the social, sexual, and alimentary habits, the religious beliefs, the medical practices, and other modes and manners described in this book . . . are sober anthropological facts, applying chiefly to the Central Eskimos." Even thus warned, readers will shiver at some of the "cold facts" that turn up in Top of the World...
Jealous Gods. Italian-born Author Ruesch, who was a world-traveling racing-car driver until a crackup made a writer out of him, saves his sympathy for the Eskimos and his wrath for missionaries who, with "tea and keks," are trying to change the Eskimos' manners & morals. Readers who gobble up Author Ruesch's enticing fictional blubber-ball may never suspect that it is dialectical bear bait until the later pages, where an aged anga-kok (medicine man) sums up his people's primitive philosophy, and makes it sound as up-to-date as a modern university...