Books: Gallic, Glum

THE NATURAL MOTHER—Dominique Dunois—Macaulay ($2.50). This book was awarded the 1929 Prix Femina-Vie Heureuse, a cash prize of 5,000 francs offered annually by the two French magazines of that name. That it won the prize merely indicates that the French are not always so gay. Neither a cheerful nor an aphrodisiac story, its flaming jacket suggests that at least it has its lickerish moments. Not so. A stout French peasant lass, Georgette Garou, knows what she wants and goes after it with few words and indomitable dignity. She wants to keep her farm, to get a husband, to have a baby. The first two ambitions she easily achieves, but with the third she has trouble. The scandal (which her fellow-villagers lap up but which will not greatly move the reader) enters when she turns in despair from her husband to another man, for procreative purposes only. The results are unfortunate: though she produces a son she loses her husband’s love, eventually her son’s respect, finally the farm. The Natural Mother is a worthy book, realistic to a degree, not noticeably shocking but definitely depressing, of the same order as Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, whose tone it occasionally echoes from afar.