French
THE LEPERS
By Henry de Montherlant, author of Pity for Women.
Translated by John Rodker.	&y. 6d. net
" I regard Pity for Women as the most important, most
astounding and the most disturbing novel translated
from the French since the time of Flaubert and Maupassant,'*
wrote John Brophy in the Daily^ Telegraph. The Lepers is a
sequel to Pity for Women and not inferior to it in interest and
importance. Montherlant makes a Byronic stand in favour
of the divine life of adventure against the feminine influence
in society. But here it is no ordinary Hippogriff he sallies
forth to slay, but that grim marital Hippogriff which lurks
in every woman for a husband.
Dutch
THE HOUSE IN HAARLEM
By Arthur van Schendel, author qjf Grey Birds, etc. Trans-
lated by M. S. Stephens.	8s. $d. net
reviewing Grey Birds, the previous book in this Dutch trilogy,
Kate O'Brien writes in the Spectator, " In my experience of
fiction reviewing I do not think that until now I have found
a new novel which I could commend to all readers, feeling
certain that those who could not read it, or reading, were not
moved and searched by it, would be shown up and to be
condoled with, whatever their arguments of defence or attack.
But here is that novel Grey Birds, ... we must hope that in
due course many more volumes of his work will be made
available to us."
The background of this second novel is Haarlem in the
eighties and nineties of the last century. It tells how the
legacy of debt bequeathed by a dissolute man mars the lives of
his son and brother, who have accepted his responsibilities in
full.
It illustrates the familiar but always fascinating problem
of the relations between one generation and the next, and the
effect on the younger of submission to the rigid religious
principles of the elder.