Books: Silk Purse

SEVEN POOR MEN OF SYDNEY—Christina Stead—Appleton-Century ($2.50).

Few U. S. readers, fewer critics, picked out of the spate of last year's novels a rich and strange book called The Salzburg Tales, by an unknown Australian author named Christina Stead. With her second, published last week, she made the oversight more remarkable. A needlewoman of extraordinary skill, she has made a lavishly embroidered silk purse out of the sow's ear of realism.

This story of contemporary Sydney is not so much a novel as an interrelated series of portraits; the portraits are not so much human likenesses as translations into brilliant descriptive talk...