NEW NOVELS-2
East and West
One Man's Destiny. By Mikhail Sholokhov. (Putnam, 25s.) The Portuguese Princess. By Tibor Ddry. (Calder and Boyars, 30s.) The Secret of Santa Vittoria. By Robert Crich- ton. (Hodder and Stoughton, 30s.) Up Above the World. By Paul Bowles. (Peter Owen, 30s.) MIKHAIL SHOLOKIIOY has come to be regarded as the Grand Old Man of Russian Letters. He has never been an experimentalist in form, and his epic about the Cossacks living on the Don has been compared with War and Peace. But as a writer he lacks Tolstoy's breadth of under- standing. His concern with people is more with what they may or should become in a classless society, rather than with what they are in a Soviet Republic that has merely replaced one kind of social hierarchy with another. If his books have a real protagonist, it is the Marxist dialectical conception of history to which every- one must comply or else be swept aside.
This attitude is implicit behind One Man's Destiny, a long short-story that he first brought out in 1956. It now serves to introduce a collec- lion of his stories, sketches, speeches and articles gathered over the last forty years. A brief foreword by the English publishers adds that some of the latter 'have been abbreviated by the elimination of some ephemeral political writing.' Even so, it is hard to see what is gained by including so basically jingoistic a comment as this on Yuri Gagarin's memorable flight into space: 'Now [here] is really something! And there's nothing more to say, since one is dumb with admiration and pride at the fantastic suc- cess of the science of our native land.'
The long short-story is set in the upper Don area during the spring of 1946. On the river bank, the narrator waits for a boat to ferry him to the other side; and as he waits, he falls into con- versation with Andrei Sokolov, a former lock- smith who had fought with the Red Army during the Revolution. Their talk, however, concentrates mainly on the past war, and Andrei recalls how he was taken prisoner and made an abortive attempt to escape. He describes the subsequent indignities in a German camp under a bullying commandant, and how, when the opportunity offered, he drove himself back to his own lines in an enemy lorry : 'As our men raced towards the car, I opened the door, fell to the ground and kissed it. . . .' This note of patriotism runs through the piece, and the story ends with Andrei trying to pick up the threads of his life with an orphan boy of six whom he has adopted (his own wife and two daughters have been wiped out in an air-raid, and his son has been shot by a sniper during the fall of Berlin). A charac- teristic moral is tagged on : One would like to think that this Russian . . . will come through, and that the boy will grow up by his fatherly shoulder, and, when he is full grown, will be able to endure all things, overcome all things on his way, if his native land calls him to its service.
Tibor Ddry's title story, The Portuguese Prin- cess, tells of the impact that a travelling theatre company makes on three Hungarian waifs. The Second World War in Europe is just ending, and in the fight for survival the children have become cynical and aggressive; the conversation of their elders seems to them 'flat' and they see the market-place as `stupid.' But the exciting adven- tures of the Portuguese Princess in the play helps to rekindle their imagination and restore their sense of wonder. Other stories in this distin- guished collection deal with 'A Charming Old Gentleman' who is a bit of an embezzler, whilst another called 'A Gay Funeral' includes a joke about the author's burial in a Budapest cemetery now reserved only for important Communists. `Games of the Underworld' consist of six inter- related stories, all set during the 1944-45 bom- bardment of the capital. Their mood alternates swiftly between tragedy and romance, and one moment the author is describing two dead soldiers lying under an overturned lorry in a tank trap, and the next two lovers fast asleep in the house opposite. A deserter in the last of these stories speaks for a whole heritage of revolution and counter-revolution when he says : `Once one begins to shoot, one never stops as long as one lives.'
In 1943 the reprisal for one dead German in Italy was twenty-five hostages. It is against this background that Robert Crichton recounts the true story of how the people of Santa Vit- toria hid one million bottles of wine from the Nazis. The whole town stands firm behind Italo Bombolini, a giant of a man whose sense of fun seems inexhaustible. When he becomes elected Mayor, he has added to the d'Annunzio invocation to LIVE DANGEROUSLY the words BUT DRIVE SLOWLY. He has read Machiavelli's The Prince forty-three times and when he is con- fronted by Captain Sepp von Prum of the Fifth Panzer Brigade, he employs every kind of cun- ning to keep the German guessing about the whereabouts of the wine. Even when the SS are called in to apply torture to the people, The Secret of Santa Vittoria is maintained. If this magnificently lively novel has a message, it is that if only one man will not break under torture, then every persecutor in history has failed, be- cause one man's courage alone is enough `to give heart to all other men.' In Santa Vittoria, in 1943, not a single man gave way.
'An undertone of implicit menace.' The phrase comes from Paul- Bowles's first novel for ten years—Up Above the World—and it is this at- mosphere of menace, which is never quite defined, that permeates the book. Outwardly the story is about a middle-aged American couple on vacation in Central America who become involved with a rich young man and his seventeen-year-old mistress. They both fall ill with a fever that produces hallucinations— hallucinations which provide the author once more with an opportunity to explore, as in The Sheltering Sky, a lush landscape barren of spiritual meaning.
NEVILLE BRAYBROOKE
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