COLLECTED STORIES

New Zealand Listener, Volume 36, Issue 915, 22 February 1957, Page 14

COLLECTED STORIES

SIX FEET OF THE COUNTRY, by Nadine Gordimer; Victor Gollancz, English price 12/6. MODERN FRENCH STORIES, edited by John Lehmann; Faber and Faber, English ice 15/-. THE SWEETBREAD AND OTHER STORIES, by Michelle Maurois; Michael Joseph, English price 12/6. THE STATE OF MIND, by Mark Schorer; Eyre and Spottiswoode, English price 15/-. T would be difficult, if not impossible, to write of South Africa today without at least touching on the distressing

racial problems. But few can have explored, with so profound a sense of human imperfectability, the depths and complexities of these problems, Few are as. gifted with imaginative insight and experience as Miss Gordimer: she is a fine writer. Not all the stories in Six Feet of the Country deal with these racial problems, even obliquely: none of the stories could be said to be about the problems. To write of Black and White is not, for Miss Gordimer, to write in black and white. She is too perceptive to be merely doctrinaire; too sympathetic to be either righteous or cynical; too imaginative to be glib. Each of her stories displays quite remarkably a full, subtle and exciting talent; a sort of remorseless sympathy for, and understanding of, the unhappy condition of compromised humanity. Mr. Lehmann’s collection of Modern French Stories excites me less. This may be because many of the stories are already familiar from New Writing and The London Magazine. Or it may be that the translations give a glaze, a sameness of texture to the stories when one is faced with a bulk of them. But however it is, this collection has stories by such writers as Sartre, Giono, Marcel Aymé: eighteen stories in all and a brief, urbane introduction by Mr. Lehmann. Michelle Maurois, daughter of a famous father, is as sophisticated,

shrewd, and unsurprised as one would, perhaps wrongly, expect. The Sweetbread and Other Stories are stories of manners and society; of the impermanence and peculiarity of the emotion of love; of the domination of "family" and the rebellion of desire. Never less than competent they sometimes achieve a genuine amusement and irony. Mr. Schorer is competent in the professional sense; and he is also Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of California. The stories collected in The State of Mind have appeared in The New Yorker, Esquire, Harper's Bazaar, and other publications. One might describe Mr. Schorer, intending no great unkindness, as a man of some weight skating, with professional surety, over ice just thick enough to bear his weight. And some of the figures he cuts are intricate and daring. But one does not feel. in’ his writing, that desperation of sympathy and imagination that so marks Miss Nadine

Gordimer.

M.

D.