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Le Noeud de vipères by François MauriacReview by: R. T. H.Books Abroad, Vol. 6, No. 4 (Oct., 1932), p. 432Published by: Board of Regents of the University of OklahomaStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40045167 .

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432 Fiction BOOKS ABROAD Fiction

directory and chose to ad: alone. He suffered the consequence of that act like a gentleman. His execution was a grave misfortune for Spain; but why prolong the bitterness, why invoke new discord, in republican ranks, when solidarity is needed? - J. A. B.

• Julien Green. Epaves. Paris. Plon. 1932. 15 francs. - Three novels, Mont'dnere,

Adrienne Mesurat and Leviathan have already revealed in Julien Green one of the most powerful and promising writers of our time. Epaves begins and ends on a lugubrious night landscape, the deserted quays of the Seine at Passy; the mighty current of the river forms an ever-present, symbolic background. Phi- lippe Clery has youth, wealth, brains, good looks, but a tiny street incident reveals to him in the most shocking manner his innate cowardice, his essential impuissance. Hen- riette, his wife, home-sick for the poverty of her youth, is unfaithful to him. Eliane, his wife's elder sister, who lives with them, is desperately in love with this man she gave Henriette eleven years before, and whom she despises at heart. Philippe knows, and feels no ambition, no jealousy, no desire. Till the day when Eliane wrings from him at last that dreadful secret of his cowardice and he stands defenseless against the fury of a long pent-up love. But the Seine is swift and deep, and the consciousness that it waits there for him in case of need will remain his last invincible bulwark. - Eliane is typical of Green's haunted women. His art is both deliberate and poetical, his analysis as cruelly indifferent as a surgical knife. Dream and reality commingle in an atmosphere heavy with fatality and anguish. - A. P. Pelmont. Cornell University.

• Hermann Hesse. Die Morgenlandfahrt. Berlin. Fischer. 1932. 4 and 6 marks. -

A wondrous, deep, very beautiful little master- piece. Fine and transparent like an Oriental fairy tale, light and tense like a dream, elevat- ing and mysterious like a legend. We live at once in several levels of consciousness and in several dimensions of time. And although al- most nothing happens in this Parzival's ad- venture, it is brimful of internal relations slowly and surely condensing themselves to a breathtaking state of expectation of a solu- tion - a solution of the riddle of life itself. And although the whole atmosphere seems remote and unearthly, weaving around romantic reminiscences of a poetic past, worse, the

history of poetry, we breathe in it our very own time, the time after the war.

Any attempt to say in brief what the "meaning" of this "Oriental Journey" is, is necessarily audacious and really impossible. Its best meaning is, that it is beautiful. And its second meaning may be said to be, that beauty and goodness of the soul are real, in spite of all experience to the contrary. And the third meaning, is perhaps, that art is not beau' ty and that the good and festive life comes first, no matter in what external shape. And last but not least, that the way to reality and to God leads through desperation and rebellion.

All these things can be said about it. The thing itself says nothing, it only radiates and sings. - GuStav Mueller. University of Okla- homa.

• Francois Mauriac. Le K[oeud de viperes. Paris. Grasset. 1932. 15 francs. - Mau-

riac is the novelist of moral isolation. Nobody else in the world of men or the world of books has ever been quite so agonizingly alone as certain of his heroes. And the word "heroes" is used advisedly, for their suffering in itself gives them heroic proportions. The protagonist of Le J^peud de viperes is a shrewd, stubborn, avaricious, suspicious, vindictive and in every respect thoroughly unlovable lawyer-financier of Gironde peasant stock, who marries an aristocrat and finds too late that there was an awkward situation and that he has played the role of catspaw. The wrong grows bigger and bigger for the remainder of his long life. A stranger in his own household, holding the purse-strings but locked out of every heart, he dreams of disinheriting wife, children, grandchildren, while the embittered and frightened household plots to dispossess him of his fortune by fair means or foul. But the author contrives an edifying ending, and there is even a possibility - only a tactful hint of a possibility, since M. Mauriac, although a de- voted Catholic, is the discreetest of artists - that an eleventh hour conversion to Catholic- ism has wiped out the ghastly past. - R. T. H.

• Karin Michaelis. Justine. K0benhavn. Jespersen 6? Pio. 1932. 8.50 kroner. - Ka-

rin Michaelis has often been called the Danish Balzac," and her scintillating talent captures and charms many readers, even when her subject, as here, is a pronounced medical- journal-case of Freud's Oedipus complex. One shrinks from so much hysteria in one

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