Books: Also Current: May 29, 1964

ONE DAY IN THE AFTERNOON OF THE WORLD by William Saroyan. 245 pages. Harcourt, Brace & World. $4.95.

There's more loving here than even a Saroyan fan can stand. "Rosey's my daughter," muses the hero, "and Van's my son and Laura's their mother so loving them is easy. So I love everybody else, too. I love the dead, I love them especially. But not so much as I love the unborn." And most wondrous of all, not so much as he loves "the unborn who are never going to be born." But how about the reader who's never going to read it? He'll take more love than even Saroyan has.

DOCTOR GLAS by Hialmar SÖderberg. 150 pages. Little, Brown. $3.95.

Even the Swedes were dismayed by Soderberg's grim-grey novel when it was published in 1910, but today it is recognized as a Scandinavian masterpiece. Dr. Glas has never made love because the act seems too gross. One day a local beauty comes to Glas with a problem: her clergyman husband keeps insisting on his connubial rights, even though her heart belongs to another. That other, she intimates, is Glas. The doctor sees his duty. He must rescue the lady from rape. One afternoon. Glas slips a potassium cyanide pill into the clergyman's Vichy water. But the man with nerve enough to murder lacks the will to make off with the widow.

That would lead to happiness, and happiness, SÖderberg implies, is the last thing a conscience can tolerate in a turn-of-the-century guilt-ridden society.

THE TOWN BEYOND THE WALL by Elie Wiesel. 179 pages. Atheneum. $3.95.

Why did so many Jews go unresisting, even unknowing, to the extermination camps? Why were so many observers apathetic? The questions refuse to go away. Now Elie Wiesel, 36, survivor of Auschwitz and Buchenwald, suggests the poet's answers with a strange, lovely novel, drenched with horror, God-besotted and all-but-autobiographical. The hero, Michael, secretly returns to his native Hungarian town, is arrested by the Communist police and interrogated. To keep silent, Michael forces himself to relive his past; through his memories, people and episodes are mortised together to form a convincing mosaic portrait of East European Jewry—gripped by a curious, optimistic fatalism and a too-great intimacy with God. Finally, released from the torture and flung in prison, he moves beyond immobility to action. In the dungeon with him is one worse off than he, a prisoner totally withdrawn and silent. After days of struggle to make contact, Michael brings the man to speak at last, and knows the touch of divine grace that accompanies the assumption of responsibility of each for each.

A LIFE FULL OF HOLES by Driss ben Hamed Charhadi, as told to and translated by Paul Bowles. 310 pages. Grove Press. $5.