NEW NOVELS

HERR HANS FALLADA IN A

GRIM VEIN

ONCE WVE HAD A CHILD. By HANS

FALLADA. Translated by ERIC SUTTON. (Putnam. 7s. 6d.)

This is the third of Herr Fallada's novels to be translated into English. The translation, as usual with Mr. Eric Sutton, is admirable, but it is doubtful whether the readers of the first two novels will be equally pleased with this. The charm and naturalness of " Little Man, What Now ?," the unforced realism and humour of " Who once eats out of the tin-bowl " are lacking here. It might be thought that, by going back for his subject to the land and the North German peasantry of his boyhood, Herr Fallada would find a more congenial background than the lower middle-class or the gaol-birds whom he had already depicted with such complete sympathy. But, although often there is remarkable power of description, the character-drawing displays violence rather than genuine strength.

The central figure is a farmer's son, Johannes Gantschow. The gruesome and fantastic history of his ancestors is told in the first pages, whose " unflinching realism" tends to become monotonous; life is not all cesspools and bestiality. As the tale proceeds, however, and particularly with the introduction of the boy's aristocratic childhood friend, Christiane, the interest broadens. It is not to develop into a simple love-story. Johannes tries to be an engineer; he marries a school-mistress. With her he settles down to a farmer's life; the land is his only genuine passion, however, and with the death of their child the rift between the bourgeois woman and the Natur,nensclh grows. They return to Johannes's father's farm, and meet Christiane, unhappily married to one of her own class. Although lohannes does not at once succumb-the earth is more important to him than a woman's bodyeventually they live together, and the book ends with the painfully detailed story of Christiane's labour in a maternity-home, the death of the child, and Johannes's return alone to his farm.

THIE GREEN CHIILD. By HERBERT READ.

(Heinemann. 7s. 6d.)

This is a very charming philosophical tale, beginning with a rather Hoff-

mannesque account of a native's l return to his village after a long absence and ending with the description of a kind of Utopia. The green child whom, on his return, Olivero, the chief character, finds being forcibly fed with lamb's blood by her husband at midnight, is a strayed member of the happy community of green people into which she happily sinks again -ith her deliverer. The middle section relates what had happened to Olivero between the time of his leaving home and the morning when, sitting by a moorland stream with the green child, he recounts to her his past. MIr. Read has an admirable manner of narration, as he showed in his war story "In Retreat": it is quiet and simple, without any straining for effect, yet he has the power...