Books: 100,000 Years Hence

STAR OF THE UNBORN—Franz Werfel —Viking ($3).

In 1943 a severe heart attack warned Novelist Franz Werfel that he might not have long to live. So the author of The Song of Bernadette decided to spend the days before darkness writing a satirical novel about the world of the future. Last August, a few days before he died, Werfel was revising the last of Star of the Unborn's 645 pages. It describes how Werfel rose again from the grave, none the worse for a sleep of some 100,000 years, on the "Third Day of the Fourth Earth-Month of the Seven Hundred and...