Shorter Notices
Round Trip. By Alfred Pertes. (Dennis Dobson. 7s. 6d.) ALFRED PERLES is a Czech refugee, who writes both in French and English. This book is in English, but has a preface of points saillants in French, and Paris is never far from Mr. Perles's thoughts. It is in two parts—a letter of about fifty pages to his friend, the American writer, Henry Miller, composed in the spring before the war just after Mr. Perles had arrived in London, and then a journal of April to July, 1945, when he was serving with the British Forces and visited Belgium, France and Germany. There are advantages and disadvantages in the publication of private papers just as they were written. The advantages are verve and spontaneity ; the disadvantages lack of arrangement and prolixity. The letter, written in a competi- tion for length with a letter of Miller's, might well have been edited a little. The promise of a brassiere and Eno's Fruit Salts in the first paragraph would not have been missed. It also might well have been divided up a little ; fifty pages of impressions and asides— including an intense admiration for London: "Every man and woman and child you meet in a London street is your friend "- poured out without a break takes some reading. In the journal, with its divisions into days, the going is much easier. But Mr. Perles has so much wit, sincerity and knowledge, and such an individual (and also perfect) command of English, that in a flood or in separate drops his discourses on Paracelsus, English girls, a London barber or his own private angel are worth reading. His descriptions of Belgium, France and Germany at the end of the war are vivid, sensitive and in places gay. He was in Paris—a Paris "singing, dancing, laughing, kissing, weeping "—on the V.E. Days. He has, as he says, "no home, no country, no race, no money, no nothing. I am absolutely free." This freedom to observe, together with a background of European culture and plenty of personal fireworks, makes these confessions both moving and entertaining.
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