Books: Upward

THE BURNING BUSH—Sigrid Undset— Knopf.

Authoress Undset's latest novel stands a very slim chance of being put on the Pope's Index Librorum Prohibitorum. If not exactly a manual for Roman Catholics, The Burning Bush should please Catholic palates and doubtless annoy any heffling Protestant literate enough to read it. A sequel to The Wild Orchid, The Burning Bush carries the story of Paul Selmer from young married days to a ripe and disillusioned middle age.

Paul was married to Björg, in whose shallows he could not long imagine himself out of his depth. He was fond of her, in a more and more managerial way, but he could not quite put out of his memory his first love, Lucy, whose brusque disappearance he had never understood. Like other fundamentally mis-married men, Paul had leanings towards saintliness. Out of business hours he read and thought much about the Roman Catholic Church. When he finally decided to join it Björg was unsympathetic; when she found he intended to bring up their children as Catholics she was downright upset. Her vulgar, cheap-scheming mother encouraged her to leave Paul, have a good time with flashy friends. Paul took Björg as she came and went, worked away at his business, his religion, his children, was quiet and peaceable, full of compassion in all his dealings.

Then Lucy turned up again—poor, deserted, with several children. Paul felt only sorry for her at first, but soon his old passion began to rack him. When Lucy's besotted husband tried to kill her, Paul threw him downstairs, broke his neck, landed himself in a queer, unsaintly pickle. His straightforwardness and Lucy's testimony got him safely through the trial. Death soon removed the temptation of Lucy from him. Ripening but not repining, Paul seemed to those around him a strong and saintly character, though he knew himself still a struggling beginner at his endless job.

Authoress Undset was converted to Catholicism in 1924. In 1925 her marriage to Painter A. C. Svarstad was annulled. She was humanly pleased to get the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1928 but gave it all ($42,000) to charity. With her four children, Sigrid Undset, now 50, lives in a house over 900 years old on the shore of a lake in the valley of Lillehammer, Norway. When she looks up from her writing, she sees on her desk a photograph of U. S. Authoress Willa Gather. Other books: The Master of Hestviken, Jenny, Krist