FOUR COUNTRIES

New Zealand Listener, Volume 36, Issue 924, 26 April 1957, Page 13

FOUR COUNTRIES

REMEMBER THE HOUSE, by Santha Rama Rau; Victor Gollancz, English price 13/6. THE SACRIFICE, by Adele Wiseman; Victor Gollancz, English price 16/-. THE SANITY INSPECTORS, by Friedrich Deich, translated from the German by Robert Kee; Putnam, English price 13/6. THE EAGLE AND THE OCK, by Frances Winwar; Alvin Redman, N.Z. price 15/-. HARM without coy whimsy, and a genuine delicacy of feeling make Remember the House an unusually fine novel. Through the eyes of the twenty-year-old Baba, we see deep into the life of wealthy Bombay Indians during Independence year. Baba’s contact with a shallow young American couple temporarily upsets her scale of values, but she finally rejects Western romanticism for the Indian concept of spiritual freedom. The sophisticated dialogue, the aware and intelligent writing and the sensitive insight into character have nothing of the quaintness cultivated by some Indian novelists. Miss Rau is as mature and poised a writer as she is an entertaining one. Another unusual setting is treated, with less success, in The Sacrifice, which, at excessive length, describes a Ukrainian Jewish family trying to adjust themselves to Canadian life. The successive misfortunes suffered by the patriarchial Abraham turn the story into a chronicle of woe, and philosophisings swamp the latter part. But the clearlyetched picture of a Jewish community, with such characters as a_ ritual slaughterer and a_ gossiping landlady, has the appeal of the unfamiliar. The English title and Hoffnung’s dustjacket falsely suggest that The Sanity (continued on next page) :

BOOKS

(continued from previous page) Inspectors is a comic novel. Apart from one amusing episode at the beginring, however, it proves to be a serious conversation piece, with a psychologist and a pastor discussing belief, metaphysics, insanity and religion, and some oblique criticism of Nazi Germany. Interesting as a story and sound on character, it is most noteworthy for its stimulating and searching ideas, Frances Winwar, who usually writes sugary treatments of historical figures, has been inspired by Napoleon to write a novel distinctly above her average. Not a distinguished book, and rather lush in places, this account of the Em-

peror by a friend gives a lively picture of the First Empire and a not unconvincing interpretation of Napoleon’s

character.

J.C.

R.