Word: werfel
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Best novel-The Forty Days of Musa Dagh by Franz Werfel (TIME...
WEAVING his heroic story against the grim tragic background of the Armenian sufferings at the hands of their diabolically cruel Turkish masters, Franz Werfel has evolved a novel which for richness of narrative detail and skillful completeness has few peers. The pitiful plight of this downtrodden Christian people reached its climax during the early years of the World War when the young Turks set their oriental cleverness to the organization of their nation as solidified national unit on the Western pattern...
...Werfel's story is the tale of these forty days of hardy struggle against the Turkish forces from without and the equally fearsome forces of starvation and chaos from within. The story is a grand one and so inspired has Werfel been with his material that he had attained truly epic reaches in his telling of it. His occupation with narrative details is at times responsible for overlength and unnecessary minutia. He also errs in neglecting the personalities of his characters who become sculptured impersonations rather than human beings. These faults are unfortunate limitations on the greatness of the work...
Though Author Werfel's scene centres on a Syrian mountain top it takes in glimpses of a wider view. In Istanbul, Berlin and Antioch German missionaries and consuls, God-fearing Moslems, meddle dangerously with high-tension wires to save a race condemned by cold policy. Not all his Turks are smoothly smiling villains nor all his Armenians embattled heroes. More than a stirring tale, a passionate defense of a persecuted minority, The Forty Days of Musa Dagh has implications that make it unwelcome in Germany...
...Author. A Viennese Jew, Franz Werfel was born a Bohemian in Prague, studied philosophy in Germany, and was teaching in the University of Leipzig when the War called him to the Russian front. Settled in Vienna after the Armistice, he has lived there quietly ever since, proclaiming in poems, essays, plays and novels his tragic philosophy: the brotherhood of man. Great frequenter of cafés, he is fond of lapsing into Oriental calm, seeking inspiration while in that state. Beethoven-locked, corpulent, 44, Author Werfel is known in Austria primarily as a poet. Some of his U. S.-translated...