Books: Passionate Painter

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(4 of 5)

Mark Sullivan and other panting contemporary historians, including those runners in the ruck who can spare no breath for comment, would do well to mark this book in passing. In 320 pages Author Brunngraber, with painstaking Teutonic methodism, has compressed a significant world-history of the past 51 (1880—1931). An alleged novel, Karl and the 20th Century focuses from time to time on its little hero's helpless struggles to keep his head above the flood; but Author Brunngraber's dogged attempt toall the ground results in a kaleidoscope of fact which sometimes dizzies, sometimes dulls the reader's attention. With more statistics to the squarehead paragraph than are contained in a chapter of John Dos Passos' 42nd Paralled or 1919, Author Brunngraber's complicated sum does not add up to nearly so impressive a human total. Failure though it must be rated, however, Karl and the 20th Century is significant as a 1933 advanced model of what our old horse-drawn novels are coming to.

Real protagonist of the story is the capitalist system. Its "hero" victim, Karl, bandy-legged legitimized bastard of a Viennese trolley conductor and a servant girl, grows up in his city slum to the slow realization that his father is a drunkard, his mother a drudge, and he himself doomed to serfdom unless he can somehow get himself into the white-collar class. He is almost there when the War swallows him. Vomited out after the armistice as an unemployed veteran, complete with scars and medals, he starves, emigrates to Sweden, goes home to more starvation. Down the long scale of disintegration he slips rung by rung. Three newspaper clippings end the book: one from Rochester. Minn, announcing the dollar-valuation of a human body's chemicals; one from Capetown, telling of a holocaust of storks killed in a freak hailstorm; one from Vienna, a sympathetic epitaph on Karl's suicide.

Sample of Karl and the 20th Century's style, method: "In Switzerland that same evening, at Kiental, where a conference of left-wing socialists was being held, Lenin gave a renewed demonstration of the way in which the imperialist war could be transformed into a class war. In the United States there was being founded the Allied Chemical & Dye Company, a combine of the chemical manufacturers of the Land of the Almighty Dollar. At Philadelphia, Frederick W. Taylor died after being ill for nine days with an attack of pneumonia, on his fifty-ninth birthday, and two hours after winding up his watch. His fellow-countrymen had graven on his tombstone : 'Frederick W. Taylor, the Father of Scientific Management.' In France, at Neuve Chapelle, meanwhile, British cannon were spitting out hundreds of thousands of shells which, like the parts of a Ford car, had been manufactured on conveyors. Never, in fact, had the world been so closely interconnected, and never had the individual human being been so powerless as now—a tiny thing amid volcanic mountains. Lieutenant Karl Lakner, however, refused almost indignantly an offer of home-leave, although he could now only endure the world by numbing his senses with liquor. He, too, therefore, was one of the participants in the great front-piercing battle of Gorlice on May 1,1915."

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