Books: Hello to All That

THE BLACK BOOK (250 pp.)—Lawrence Durrell—Dufton ($4.95).

Newspapers constantly relay the rejoicings of the sweepstakes winner and the parent whose kidnaped child has been found alive. And LIFE once photographed that rare dawning in which a young girl first realizes that she will be beautiful.

Another sort of epiphany is less familiar: that moment of astonishment and nascent arrogance when a beginning author discovers that he is a very good writer.

Lawrence Durrell, whose recent quartet of novels about Alexandria are as popular in upper Bohemia as clam dip, made the discovery in 1936 when at 24, he wrote The Black Book. This first...