Books: Lament for the Century

THE DISINHERITED (274 pp.)—Michel del Castillo—Knopf ($3.95).

This is another lament for the 20th century by the Spaniard who wrote Child of Our Time (TIME, Oct. 20, 1958). In that moving autobiographical novel, Author del Castillo charted a sad trail from the corpse-strewn streets of Madrid to the concentration camps of France and Germany, to something like inner peace at a Jesuit school back in Spain. Still only 26, and now living in Paris, he tries in The Disinherited to revisit the Spanish revolution, which flamed around him when he was a child. At this distance, memory is small help, and...