Fiction: Recent Books: Oct. 25, 1937

GREATHOUSE — Edward Eyre Hunt —Harcourt, Brace ($2.50). A new wrinkle in U. S. historical novels. Hugh Great-house, a socially conscious Every Little Man, who ages only five years in each 25, arrives in Salem during witchcraft days, remains for the Revolutionary War, the Aaron Burr conspiracy, the Gold Rush, the march of Coxey’s Army, the World War. Of such ventures into this swampy field, Virginia Woolf’s Orlando is the only one that has not bogged down.

THE TRIAL — Franz Kafka — Knopf ($2.50). Simply told, simply incomprehensible surrealist horror story about a respectable bank clerk who, for reasons never disclosed to him or the reader, is arrested, released, questioned for a year, executed gorily by phantoms. Austrian Author Kafka, praised by such writers as Thomas Mann, Andre Gide, Aldous Huxley, died in 1924, at 41, of tuberculosis contracted on like compositions.

REHEARSAL IN OVIEDO—Joseph Peyré—Knight ($2). Fast-action story of the Asturian revolt of October 1934, centring on a rebel shock troop leader who goes under, independently of the main defeat, because his emotions and his dynamite throwing do not synchronize; by a Goncourt Prize winner (Glittering Death) whom some critics incorrectly fitted to wear Hemingway’s mantle.

KATRINA — Sally Salminen — Farrar &

Rinehart ($2.50). Vigorous first novel by the Finnish immigrant housemaid (of Mr. & Mrs. Rodney Proctor) which last year made literary headlines as winner of the Helsingfors Prize Novel Contest (50.000 marks), portraying the peasantry of Author Salminen’s native Aland Islands.

THE FAITHFUL WIFE—Sigrid Undset—Knopf ($2.50). Told with Nobel Prizewinner Undset’s slow-footed grace, the story of a childless Norwegian couple who, after divorce and remarriage, undo the mistakes of their Dangerous-Age blundering.

ENCHANTER’S NIGHTSHADE—Ann Bridge —Little, Brown ($2.50). Heady Victorian romance, well-needled with modern intimacies, concerning the complicated concussion on an Italian nobleman’s large clan caused by a beautiful, erudite, naive English governess; by the author of Peking Picnic.

THEY SEEK A COUNTRY—Francis Brett Voung—Reynal & Hitchcock ($2.75). Long (602 pages), melodramatic, historical novel about South Africa, which Author Young first saw as an officer in the World War; for the same audience that likes tales of pioneer days in the U. S.

THE BURIED CANDELABRUM — Stefan Zweig— Viking ($2.50). Simply told, reverently dramatized folk tale based on the -legend of the Menorah. Jewry’s “Holy Grail”; by an Austrian writer (no kin and no equal of Arnold Zweig) whose U. S. reputation is much wider than his reading audience.

Non-Fiction

THE RECTORY FAMILY—John Franklin Carter—Coward-McCann ($2.50). Placidly bitter reminiscences of his “too happy and too comfortable” pre-War New England boyhood, by an ex-Embassy attache, political commentator, mystery writer, whose known pseudonyms are Jay Franklin, John Carter. The Unofficial Observer, Diplomat. Author Carter suggests that he might have been, under equivalent English traditions, a first-rate diplomat.

THE ZEAL OF THY HOUSE—Dorothy L. Savers—Harcourt, Brace ($1.50). Poetic, religious play about the rebuilding of the choir of Canterbury, destroyed by fire in 1174, written by the English mystery story expert at the invitation of the Friends of Canterbury Cathedral and performed at the 1937 festival. For the 1935 festival T. S. Eliot wrote Murder in the Cathedral.

BACKGROUND IN TENNESSEE — Evelyn Scott—McBride ($2.75). Tinkering autobiographically to see what makes her tick, Author Scott strews 302 pages with an interesting litter of parts, ranging from colonial ancestry to the boils that gave her an inferiority complex that made her a writer.

DICTATORS AND DEMOCRACIES—Calvin B. Hoover—Macmillan ($1.50). Five essays by Duke University’s professor of economics on the thesis that Germany, Italy and Soviet Russia are fundamentally alike, concluding that Britain alone can stem the totalitarian tide.

AN INTELLECTUAL AND CULTURAL HISTORY OF THE WESTERN WORLD—Harry Elmer Barnes—Random House ($5). Bulky (1,250 pages) but digestible digest tracing from a liberal viewpoint the main currents in the arts and sciences from primitive man to the present. Illustrated.