Books: Dizzying

LIFE BEGINS TOMORROW—Guide de Verona (Translated by Isabel Grazebrook) — Button $2.00). The emotional and stylistic tumult of this book will quite dismay the normal reader. It is an attempt to plumb terrific abysses, to scale sheer pinnacles of human nature; and the author, dizzied by exertion, indulges a hot Latin temperament to inartistic excess. With strong physiologic emphasis, the story is told of a medical genius who attends his best friend, an engineering genius. He and the friend’s wife are overpowered by love for each other, she becoming enceinte. Death of the husband will mean life for them, and the doctor brings it about with a slow poison. Through tortuous labyrinths, accompanied by an idiot’s violin whining of life and death, the guilty pair develop their deeds from dark sins to a triumph over destiny.