Books: No Pi in the Sky

THE TOWER OF BABEL (427 pp.)—Ellas Conetti, translated by C. V. Wedgwood—Alfred Knopf ($3.50).

This gruesome novel of human beastliness was one of the last (and most appropriate) to be published in Vienna before the Anschluss. Last year, it appeared in translation in England (where Bulgarian-born Author Canetti now lives) and set the critics ablaze pro & con. "Mere Central-European portentousness . . . at once heavy and trivial. . . . A terrific and inconsequent to-do about trifles,"harrumphed the dignified London Times Literary Supplement. "Appalling, magnificent," exclaimed the Spectator, "screams and bellows of evil out of which [a] supremely mad, unfaceable...