Books: Room No. 5

STEPHANIA (375 pp.)—llona Karmel—Houghton Mifflin ($3.75).

So far, the 1953 book season has produced no brilliant major novels, but it has already introduced some highly promising first novelists, e.g., 27-year-old George Lanning, author of The Happy Rural Seat, and 31-year-old Jefferson Young, who wrote A Good Man (see Recent & Readable). Now comes a 27-year-old Polish girl named llona Karmel with a quietly gripping story called Stephania.

llona Karmel spent her late teens in Nazi concentration camps, and when V-E came, her body was wasted and broken. Her spirit, as events proved, was intact. After a prolonged convalescence in Stockholm, llona was admitted to the U.S. in 1948, and last year graduated from Radcliffe. While enrolled in a "creative writing" course given by Poet Archibald MacLeish at Harvard,* she began a novel about her Stockholm experience which so impressed MacLeish that he recommended it to his publisher.

MacLeish was right. Though almost plotless and seldom dramatic, Stephania is a mature study of life in a hospital for the handicapped. Stephania, her body tortured by the Nazis and her mind churning with memories of horror, upsets the placid routine of the two other patients in Room No. 5. Desperately intent on having her crippled body reshaped, she has neither understanding nor sympathy for the resignation of the paralyticThura or the gross self-indulgence of Fröken Nilsson, who has overeaten to the point where her broken leg cannot support her porcine body.

For long stretches, Novelist Karmel offers a meticulous description of the intrigue that is almost inevitable among patients who are not acutely ill yet must stay in bed month after month. Stephania's willfulness, her almost ferocious desire to bear the agonies of a plaster cast that may reshape her grotesque body, seem offensive to the other patients. But gradually they gain some of her hunger to become normal again, while she learns to value their simple, unheroic humanity. Under Stephania's prodding, little Thura begins to move her paralyzed fingers, while Fröken Nilsson, outraged at being called an "old heap of fat" by Stephania, goes on a rigorous diet. Only Stephania, misshapen and disappointed, must go back alone into the world, to try to win a place for herself.

Writing English as if she had been born to the language, Ilona Karmel has composed a novel of admirable restraint. She has sketched in the horrors of Stephania's past only lightly, and has avoided the trap of feeling sorry for her heroine. In its quiet, even-paced way, Stephania is a novel of complete integrity—and a testimonial to one of the human rights that finally bind all men together, the right to suffer.