BRIEFER MENTION
Love and Other Stories, by Anton Chekhov, translated by Constance Garnett (12mo, 306 pages; Macmillan: $2). This, the thirteenth and final volume in Mrs Garnett's invaluable series of translations of Chekhov's work, contains twenty-four stories of far from even merit. As a part of Chekhov's output, they claim attention, but most of them are several cuts below his best work. They are, as Mrs Garnett says, "mainly pot-boilers"—vivid fragments, sardonic pictures, and somewhat sketchy stories.
The Enchanted April, by the author of Elizabeth and Her German Garden (12mo, 313 pages; Doubleday, Page: $1.90) creates its own enchantment, to which Italy and the calendar are but supplementary. It is compounded of deft psychology, gentle irony, and sheer joyousness—all welded in a narrative which twinkles with wit and poetry. The novelist sees her men eye to eye with Jane Austen, and her women eye to eye with Barrie; they emerge into the radiant Italian sunlight with just enough of the reality rubbed off them to make it highly probable that they would act and react precisely as they do. At any rate, one's scepticism is charmed into silence—and that, in itself, is achievement.
Prince Hempseed, by Stephen Hudson (12mo, 250 pages; Knopf: $2) sheds a definite antecedent illumination upon Richard Kurt, the dominant figure of Mr Hudson's two earlier novels. Here is a sympathetic and essentially poetic narrative of boyhood—a story of mingled aspiration and frustration, projected without sentimentality and without recourse to the befogging machinery of Freud. The author discloses an unerring sense of adolescent psychology, a fine grasp of values, and artistic economy in the use of mere plot. Altogether, an arresting novel in which form and content have been welded into a complete harmony.
Island of the Innocent, by Grant Overton (12mo, 332 pages; Doran: $2) is one of those successful novels that lead us to believe the novel must be destroyed. It possesses no single distinguishing characteristic that might lift it above the general run of pretty popular books unless, perhaps, it be a not too happy ending. It is all a dreary level of mediocrity smacking of the uninspired, if sincere, literary tradesman.
To Tell You the Truth, by Leonard Merrick (12mo, 311 pages; Dutton: $1.90) is uniform with the collected works which have gone before, save that "it contains no Introduction by a distinguished professional colleague of Mr Merrick"—an omission which is not exactly unbearable when one recalls the frail nature of some of those introductions. These short stories will neither add to nor detract from their author's standing, being competent and readable, but not distinguished, except in their uniform absence of distinction.
