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BALTHAZAR, by Lawrence Durrell. The second volume of a projected tetralogy extends the large hint given by last year's Justine: that Anglo-Irish Author Durrell writes just about the most original prose fiction to be found today. Balthazar revisits the scene—Alexandria—and the characters of Justine, catches them again in a blaze of passion, decadence and self-doubt that adds a new dimension of truth to the many faces of love.
LOLITA, by Vladimir Nabokov. The year's most controversial novel and also, by all odds, the best written. Simply as the story of a perverted sexual adventure, it is shocking. As an exploration of the secret places of the heart, mind and spirit, ruled by terrible private devils, it moves beyond shock into compassion.
THE ONCE AND FUTURE KING, by T. H. White. In a giant labor of patriotic love, British Author White gives old King Arthur a likelier dressing-up than all the mythmakers of the past.
DOCTOR ZHIVAGO, by Boris Pasternak. The man who won the 1958 Nobel Prize for literature was not allowed to accept it, but he produced the most remarkable novel to come out of Russia since the Revolution—a sprawling, lyrical, religious reaffirmation of man's right to be free and to be himself.
THE LAW, by Roger Vailland. In the Italian town of Porto Manacore, the main sports seem to be sex and formalized verbal abuse. Author Vailland won France's Prix Goncourt with this slick, cynical and true-ringing novel of small-town hunger—for women, for power, for land and money.
THE SECRET, by Alba de Céspedes. Mamma, with grown children and a husband who takes her for granted, is an Italian; but she stands for the mammas of all countries who belatedly think that devotion to home and family have robbed them of more exciting ways to live. Author de Céspedes is a better guide to the female heart and mind than most of the psychologists in the bookstalls.
CHILD OF OUR TIME, by Michel del Castillo. A harrowing, terribly unsophisticated testimony to man's capacity for inhumanity, and a minor masterpiece of its kind. Written as a novel, it reads more like the bitter, autobiographical odyssey of the boy who, at three, saw corpses on the streets of Madrid, experienced the concentration camp's life-in-death during the '30s and '40s, survived the indifference of his own parents, and could still perceive the good in life.
BREAKFAST AT TIFFANY'S, by Truman Capote. A long story and three short ones about the waifs and strays of the world who search for handholds and usually get their fingers stepped on. Holly Golightly, a good little bad girl, is the disarming and memorable heroine of the title story. Caparisoned in Capote's crisp, shining prose, she and her raffish companions seem like characters from a tawdry but real bedtime story.