Books: An Insight into Blindness

THE FOURTH WORLD (318 pp.)—Daphne Afhas—Putnam ($3.75).

In the Bible, both Luke and Matthew are agreed that if the blind lead the blind, both will wind up in the ditch.† In The Fourth World, Novelist Daphne Athas does more than underwrite the common sense of the Gospels. She digs a fictional ditch big enough to hold both the sighted and the sightless, and the world into which she leads the reader would seem simply nightmarish if it did not also ring simply true.

A Different Breed. It is nine years now since Author Athas wrote a small but heartbreaking first novel, The Weather...