LOOKING AROUND

New Zealand Listener, Volume 29, Issue 737, 28 August 1953, Page 13

LOOKING AROUND

PLEASURES STRANGE AND SIMPLE, by William. Sansom; the Hogarth Press. English price, 12/6. PLEASURES STRANGE AND SIMPLE is William Sansom’s first collection of essays. He brings to them the wide range of interests, the quick eye for colourful background ahd _ incident, and a flair for the apt and telling phrase, that have made him one of the best short story writers of the decade. At worst, this beok is brilliant journalism. The journalist’s preoccupation with the sensational or bizarre is there, too. He visits a+ nudist colony, and Andalusia and Tunis; he analyses Edgar Allan Poe and jive; he plays cheerfully with the hundred-and-oné ways in which we can die by accident, and takes another quick look at Blondin crossing the Niagara on a tight-rope. But everything -comes crisp and fresh from his pen. He lends us his five senses; and a sixth, good humour. Good reporters don’t deal in abstractions, They don’t so much tell us what they see and hear and feel as make us see and hear and feel for ounselves. That is Sansom’s gift. : It is no paradox, then, that the most exciting part of an exciting book should be on the most matter-of-fact topic. Good as he is on. foreign ground, he is most effective fat home. The essays on London-on Soho and its history, and

an exploration in time and space of a third of a mile of undergrcund, from King’s Cross-are as good as Bosweil himself; and as fervently fond.

Anton

Vogt