CURRENT LITERATURE
MAJORCA By Francis Caron
This book (Cassell, 8s. 6d.) is the diary of a young painter who lived for a time, before the revolution, in El Terreno, a suburb of Palma de Mallorca. El Terreno was a sort of third-rate Bohemian colony : sail-cloth trousers, shiny dinner- jackets, German pensions and American bars were its main features. The author's experiences were not unusual. He spent his time drinking, bathing, painting and coping with women who wanted to be painted in the nude. A few of them had their way, as the illustrations testify. In the end he ran, or rather swam away with a beautiful American woman called Gloria, and there the diary ends. But for the illustra- tions, mostly reproductions of pencil and wash drawing that show great sensibility, it would scarcely have been worth publishing. It tells us practically nothing about Majorca, and the one walk which the author made through the country is described with an eye for the picturesque rather than the real. One feels, therefore, that the chief function of the text is to account for the inclusion of so many non-Majorcan female portraits in a book called Majorca. The produc- tion of the book deserves unqualified praise.
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