Books: Illusions Worth Living For

SPANISH LEAVES by Honor Tracy. 189 pages. Random House. $3.95.

In Paris, Irish Novelist Honor Tracy's favorite smell is the musty odor of the Metro on rainy days; in Spain, she prefers the fragrance of open sewers. "A vision comes," she writes, "an enchanting still life of broken glass and pomegranate rinds with a dead rat floating in iridescent water, and beckons to me sweetly."

Not sewers alone, but all the things that offend the typical tourist in Spain —stalled trains, unpredictable electricity, fire engines screaming like "Amazon howling monkeys"—delight Honor Tracy in this brief and lively travel book. She is entertained by...

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