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CONTRASTS IN WRITING

EAST OF EDEN, by Jehn Steinbeck; Heinemann, English price, 15/-. CAPTAIN JAN, by Jan de Hartog; Cleaver-Hume Press. En§lish price, 15/=. MARTHA QUEST, by Doris Lessing; Michael Joseph. English price, 12/6. THE ESSENTIAL R. B. CUNNINGHAME GRAHAM, edited by Paul Bloomfield; Jonathan Cape. English price, 15/-. OHN STEINBECK has been the most dedicated of the naturalists. on whom the mantle of Zola and Dreiser falls more fittingly than on the rounded shoulders of James T. Farrell. His vision of man as violent and uninhibited, and woman as merely a vessel of fertility, is a limited one, yet ‘in East of Eden, his best novel since The Grapes of Wrath, he sees also the dignity of man through his animality, the saving innocence and honesty of his hoboes and farm-hands. This rambling chronicle of an Irish-Californian family and the youngster from the Eastern seaboard who comes out to make his home with them, covers 50 years of America’s great overland migration. One or two characters, like Adam Trask, stand out, but the story is too long-winded and the handling of it too blunt for one of. America’s major novelists to stand or fall by. The author of The Fourposter and other Broadway comedies has written in Captain Jan a wild, Picaresque novel about Holland’s ocean-going tugboats. De Hartog’s hero tows dredgers and floating cranés across the, Atlantic, assaults his boss for sending him to sea in a worthless vessel, rescues a millionaire’s yacht, and finally owns his own tug. The book’s violent deeds are recounted with a flippancy that conceals the author’s real feeling for his tugboatmen. Doris Lessing’s third book is the story of a South African girl, and from the moment when Martha Quest first appears at 15 on the front steps of her father’s farmhouse, reading Havelock Ellis in the sun in rebellion against her mother’s narrow-minded bullying, the pattern of what will follow is fairly clear, from her first ball in a forbidden dress to a job in the city, sexual. emancipation and an unhappy marriage. The theme is redeemed by the intensity of its telling. It is a pleasure once more to read Cunninghame Graham, the aristocratic Scot known as Don Roberto of the Pampas, or "Mexican ' Jack" ‘to his (continued on next page)

BOOKS (continued from previous page) enemies, in this polished selection from his stories of England, Morocco and Spain, the South American and Mexican yarns, and extracts from the histories of the Spanish Conquistadores.

P.J.

W.

This article text was automatically generated and may include errors. View the full page to see article in its original form.I whakaputaina aunoatia ēnei kuputuhi tuhinga, e kitea ai pea ētahi hapa i roto. Tirohia te whārangi katoa kia kitea te āhuatanga taketake o te tuhinga.
Permanent link to this item
Hononga pūmau ki tēnei tūemi

https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/periodicals/NZLIST19530605.2.25.5

Bibliographic details
Ngā taipitopito pukapuka

New Zealand Listener, Volume 28, Issue 725, 5 June 1953, Page 13

Word count
Tapeke kupu
416

CONTRASTS IN WRITING New Zealand Listener, Volume 28, Issue 725, 5 June 1953, Page 13

CONTRASTS IN WRITING New Zealand Listener, Volume 28, Issue 725, 5 June 1953, Page 13

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