Books: Pathetick Passion

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GREAT CIRCLE—Conrad Aiken—Scrib- ner ($2). Though Author Aiken takes his title from geometry (great circle: a circle on the surface of a sphere, whose plane passes through the centre of the sphere), his motto from Elizabethan John Marston ("O frantick, fond, pathetick passion! Is't possible such sensuall action should clip the wings of contemplation? . . . Fie, can our soule be underling to such a vile con-troule?") and his subject from everyday life (a deceived husband), yet his method is modern, cinematic, "stream-of-consciousness." Poet of involved psychological states, he is usually...