Word: tabori
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COMPANIONS OF THE LEFT HAND (338 pp.)-George Tabori-Houghton Mifflin...
Hungarian-born George Tabori, 32, is almost unknown as a novelist. Educated in Germany, trained as a journalist in the Balkans and the Middle East, he now lives in England, has worked for the BBC since 1943. Companions of the Left Hand,* his second novel (the first: Beneath the Stone, 1945), is a sardonic political parable, overwritten in spots, preachy in others, but crafty, speculative and Koestler-like in its ambiguities and undertones...
...outline, the story resembles Thomas Mann's Death in Venice: an aging writer goes down to the Italian seaside to rest in the sun. Tabori takes this theme, twists it around to fit a modern situation and his own ends. The aging writer is Stefan Farkas, noted Hungarian dramatist. His train reaches San Fernando one day in the summer of 1943. He has been told that San Fernando will be "safe" for months to come. He wants a vacation and a rest. The war has made him nervous...
...conclusion is the most original part of Companions of the Left Hand, also the most dubious. From one angle it reads like a sermon on the fatal rigidity of the Communist mind, from another like a bright red Sermon on the Mount. Novelist Tabori's own views are obviously far to the left, although he denies that he is a member of any party. Whatever his politics, he has written one of the season's most striking novels...