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THE LORD OF LABRAZ—Pio Baroja —Knopf ($2.50). The Spanish hail Señor Baroja as their most popular living talespinner. He writes a little like Dickens, a little like Stevenson, always like a Spaniard—that is, with bold light, harsh shading. His story here is quite simple—a blind nobleman in a priest-ridden hill town quixotically shoulders his brother's misdeeds, earning only calumny and spite from the populace, renouncing society and going to wander, Lear-like, over the bleak table-lands with a wronged barmaid for his Cordelia, a Basque beggar for Poor Tom. It is fiction with strong bones.
Again, Benefield
SHORT TURNS—Barry Benefield— Century ($2). These 14 short and simple annals of the inarticulate have a uniform characteristic, that each climax shows a human being with all his forces gathered in unaccustomed intensity to perform what seems the finest possible act under inexorable circumstances. A house of harlots buries one of its number, masking the dead girl's true profession from her mother; the mother perceives, but plays out her role. An Arkansas stonecutter, cuckold, is reluctantly driven to revenge by public opinion; his joy is great when he finds that the couple he has strangled in the dark are strangers. A Louisiana farmer, despairing of love from his mail-order wife, puts his mouth over the muzzle of his shotgun. A fading saleswoman sees a bearded lover watching daily from a neighboring window for her arisings; discovers the face to be a carved Christ's; resigns herself once more to loving the celluloid doll in her store-window demonstration of a patent crib. There are moments when the author's sensitive comprehension threatens to quaver and mawk, but these moments are rare and in them quiet ecstasy is equally imminent. Some may say that the frustrated or guilty woman appears rather more frequently in Benefield stories than seems natural; that he is thus limited, perhaps hipped. But not even Hawthorne touched this subject with purer compassion; and a man must do what he can do best. Furthermore, there is that enveloping quality about Author Benefield's troubled situations that reaches far beyond the particular persons and scenes to include all men's troubles, of all kinds. Finally, there is gentle, whimsical accuracy of detail, in few words—how little mules trot; an Italian undertaker "ostentatiously piddling through his ornate futilities"; an executive's comfort in his row of pearl-topped desk buttons; a kitty named John the Baptist.