DEEP IN THE RED
THE SQUARE SUN, by Stefan. Knapp; Museum Press, English price 18/-. TEFAN KNAPP is a young English painter, by one of those historic processes that can make a small crowded island a sanctuary. Born in Poland, he was still at school when the war broke out; and he graduated, via Soviet slave camps, into the Polish forces and the R.A.F. This book is an autobiography. It is full of terror, pity and quiet pride: a diary with a difference. Millions of young people have been lost in the shambles of modern Europe; but Knapp has found himself again. The book is part of a reconstruction of personality. Oddly enough, there are only oblique references to politics and war. Essen-
tially Knapp describes Ja condition humaine in the midst of these things, and I suspect that he writes even better than he paints. Examples of his art shown in the illustrations indicate a preoccupation with the bizarre. Conversely, the prose is clean and personal, when describing the intolerable. The Square Sun emerges as the most gripping indictment of the Soviet regime that I have ever read. It is im-. possible not to believe the stories of the slave camps, and impossible to justify them. The monolithic state, with its beehive concept of man, is a negation of human dignity. But that Knapp (and others) can survive is a proof that it is not even effictent. The muddling he describes is quite British, and his sense of huméur internationally human.
Anton
Vogt
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https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/periodicals/NZLIST19570823.2.24.3
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 37, Issue 941, 23 August 1957, Page 17
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254DEEP IN THE RED New Zealand Listener, Volume 37, Issue 941, 23 August 1957, Page 17
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Copyright in the work University Entrance by Janet Frame (credited as J.F., 22 March 1946, page 18), is owned by the Janet Frame Literary Trust. The National Library has been granted permission to digitise this article and make it available online as part of this digitised version of the New Zealand Listener. You can search, browse, and print this article for research and personal study only. Permission must be obtained from the Janet Frame Literary Trust for any other use.
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