BETWEEN TWO WORLDS

New Zealand Listener, Volume 28, Issue 717, 10 April 1953, Page 15

BETWEEN TWO WORLDS

ZTUSSLES WITH TIME, by Jules Romains, translated by Gerard Hopkins; Sidgwick and epheon. English price, 13/6. THE ESTATE N ABRUZZI, by Francesco Jovine, translated by Archibald Colquhoun; McGibbon and Kee. English price, 12/6. ULES ROMAINS’ Tussles with Time consists of one long and one short story about the supernatural. Perhaps "paranormal" would better convey his deliberately prosaic and _ systematic approach. The subtlety of Romains’s ideas on these matters and the exactness with which they are stated are remarkable but no less so is his gift of story-telling. The first of the stories descfibes the narrator’s efforts to account for the mysterious appeatances of a "dead" friend; the second with the adventure of a survivor from the bombing of Rotterdam who discovers in New York a compulsion to shut himself away from the sky. They are both virtuoso performances and quite engrossing. As much cannot be said for Francesco Jovine’s The Estate in Abruzzi. It seems

a competent example of an established type rather than an individual achievement. As the title suggests, the centre of the novel is a more or less derelict estate in the Abruzzi over which people of various classes come into generally disastrous contact with each other at the time of the rise of the Fascisti. I cannot say I found it very interesting although, as in many other post-war Italian novels and films, a conscientious realism did not exclude some poetic feeling.

Hubert

Witheford