GREEN HENRY (706 pp.)Gottfried Keller, translated by A. M. Holt-Grove ($6.50).
The dust jacket of this 100-year-old novel proclaims it to be "undoubtedly the greatest masterpiece of fiction by a Swiss writer," which is a little like referring ecstatically to the tallest building in Newark, N.J. In the period in which Gottfried Keller was busy being the greatest Swiss novelist (Der Grüne Heinrich was published in 1854), Tolstoy wrote War and Peace, Melville wrote Moby Dick, and Emily Brontë wrote Wuthering Heights. Still, Keller's book, in its first English translation, has enough literary...
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