Books: How to Stop Being a Vagabond

EXILE by Peter Weiss. 245 pages. Delacorfe. $5.95.

Peter Weiss, author of Marat/ Sade and The Investigation, is best known as one of the more strident practitioners of the theater of fact. Therefore it should come as no surprise that this novel contains little fancy; it is frankly and almost completely autobiographical. Like his plays, Exile is a characteristically raw and intensely passionate statement. Weiss's first-person hero is a German-born half Jew who at 18 leaves his country to get away from the Nazis. He subsequently sojourns in England, Czechoslovakia, Switzerland and Sweden (where Weiss now lives). But the title refers not...

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