BEYOND HIS REACH
AN OWL IN THE SUN. By Leslie Kark. Macmillan. HE theme of this book is difficult and can only be conveyed through subtlety, through delitate points of suggestion, through vivid portraiture. The author takes a very sensitive young man, torn between his French blood and his English upbringing, who goes to work in Turkey and falls desperately in love with a German femme fatale with a bad reputation. Knowing she will be bad for him.he still marries her, and when he returns after_the war, the victim of disseminated sclerosis contracted in a German prison, she flaunts his own brother as a potential lover. ‘But in the end the brother kills her in a fit of jealousy and the moping "hero" dies of his disease. This difficult situation is presented in a style too factual for the theme and yet not factual enough for our interest; the characters are mere puppets, moving lifelessly and tonelessly across the pages: the Frenchman simply does not exist in (continued on next page)
(continued from previous page) the reader’s imagination and the femme fatale has charms which we have to take for granted but which we never see at
work.
B.L.
C.
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https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/periodicals/NZLIST19490513.2.39.2
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 20, Issue 516, 13 May 1949, Page 18
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200BEYOND HIS REACH New Zealand Listener, Volume 20, Issue 516, 13 May 1949, Page 18
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Copyright in the work University Entrance by Janet Frame (credited as J.F., 22 March 1946, page 18), is owned by the Janet Frame Literary Trust. The National Library has been granted permission to digitise this article and make it available online as part of this digitised version of the New Zealand Listener. You can search, browse, and print this article for research and personal study only. Permission must be obtained from the Janet Frame Literary Trust for any other use.
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