Fiction
Jealousy and Medicine. By Michal Choromanski. Translated by Eileen Arthurton. (The Willow Press. 12s. 6d.)
Imperial Venus. By Edgar Maas. (Westhouse. 10s. 6d.)
IN lealousy and Medicine the Willow Press has chosen for its first publication a remarkable novel, first published in Warsaw in 1932 and subsequently translated into many European languages. Its theme is nothing newer than the familiar story of husband, wife and lover ; but the treatment is original and the author's way of novel-making something worthy of serious attention. Unfolding the ingenious wrappings of this story is likz examining the crisply curling petals of some complicated bud. It is immensely involved, but each involution is cunningly and perfectly fitted to the next. The reader is not made aware of the details of the story merely by the development of a sequence of events. The details are impressed upon him by repeated but different accounts of the same thing ; by accounts which overlap 'and illuminate each other. The author reaches a certain point in his story—and is reminded of something. He goes back, and, in doing so, is reminded of something else. Going back on that, he makes apparent some small relationship between the first layer of his writing and the third layer. The folds of his story are thus wrapped together like the fingers of an un- opened fern. Each frond of writing is separate, but all unite to make one delicate complication.
Comparisons have been made between the art of Choromanski and the art of Proust. The likeness is obvious, and yet it is not well founded. Both certainly are relentless examiners ; both com- monly devote many pages to the events of an hour. But in the deeper details of method the two authors are profoundly different. This book, for instance, is not a dispassionate, or a humorously observed, examination of jealousy—as it might have been if Proust had written it. lealousy and Medicine is a dramatic piece of writing. Its materials are arranged with theatrical ingenuity. Its events hang on coincidences of time, and points are neatly reflected from one page to another. It is a novel which has been very carefully stage-managed, and it is significant that it has been drama- used twice in the Warsaw and Wilno theatres. The story of Swann's jealousy would not lend itself at all to the same treatment.
Again, there is nothing grammatically involved in the writing of this book. It is the theme that is wrapped up, not the style. The first thirty pages are a little difficult (because so differently con- ceived from the accepted forms of narration), but as the reader begins to understand the author's plan, the book becomes easy to read, and as he begins to discover the truth of Wildar's torturing problem, he becomes as earnestly interested in its solution as the jealous husband himself. What did happen during that surgical operation which is so cleverly described in the middle of the book? The author holds the reader in as carefully calculated a suspense as the wife holds the husband. This wife is one of the best things in the book. She is not one of the larger characters, and at first she appears to be so enigmatic as to be almost without individuality. But it is her behaviour which is the key to the whole action, and eventually she betrays herself as a brilliant and selfish liar, false to both. One Of the features of Jealousy and Medicine is the des- cription of the autumn storm which rages throughout the whole novel, cold, fierce, disco.mfiting—a precisely right accompaniment for an unhappy, uncomfortable story of justly jealous love.
"What's he getting- at?" "Good enough." "All worked up." "Right now." "It won't help me any." Phrases like these are not well placed in a historical novel. But apart- from these few ex- cursions into the wrong century, Imperial Venus, a story of Napoleon's lively sister, Pauline, has a certain gusto and keeps the reader interested in a sto'ry which • will be new' to most people. Obliging Fellow, too, is interesting. It is with difficulty that the mind consents in 1947 to be bothered with a novel about Germans and Austrians interned on an English race-course and in the Isle of Man in the remote days of 1940. But Leo Kahn gives a picture of English internment camps which the reader accepts as just—
and continues to read with mild amusement. • V. C. CLINTON-BADDELEY.
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