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Seldom has the compulsion to go to war been better portrayed than in this novel by Yugoslavia's most celebrated warrior-ideologue. Milovan Djilas wrote Under the Colors while serving a prison sentence for criticizing Tito's regime. But the book is not concerned with contemporary events. It re-creates the clash between Serbian and Moslem in Djilas' native Montenegro in the late 19th century. Djilas lost much of his own family in this incessant warfare; he grew up on legends of heroism and endurance.
Djilas depicts everyday life on both sides: slender Turkish girls enveloped in soft shadows and sly glances, the insistent murmur of garden streams in the background: hearty Serbs bathed in the rich sunlight that pours copiously on gleaming mountains. But the book's cumulative power lies in appalling battle details. Heads sail briskly from necks and are hoisted on pikes. A Montenegrin grabs a Turk's horse and tries frantically to kick a severed leg out of the stirrup. During a lunch break between bashing feet and smashing kidneys, an unforgettable father-son torture team laments the passing of the good old days when they did not have to worry about leaving scars.
Djilas is too flinty a Montenegrin to offer much in the way of redemption for such suffering. Men die bravely for a cause that is elusive, not to say parochial. Still, they manage to wrest from the din of battle a selflessness that frees them, if only for moments, from their world of pain.
WORD PEOPLE by Nancy Caldwell Sorel. Illustrated by Edward Sorel. 304 pages. American Heritage. $6.95.
With pungent caricatures and brisk capsule biographies, Word People profiles a collection of men and women whose proper names have become part of the English language.
Some of the chosen eponyms are familiar: the sandwich was once an earl; the pompadour a king's mistress; sadism originated with the Marquis de Sade. Many more are likely to surprise: maud lin is the old vernacular form of (Mary) Magdalene, usually pictured weeping: Jules Leotard was a 19th century trapeze artist; mausoleum derives from the tomb of "the wily satrap" Mausolus, in Turkey; and tawdry comes from the cheap souvenirs sold at the shrine of a 7th century Anglo-Saxon princess who was called St. Audrey.
One hesitates to be philippic (thank you, Philip of Macedonia), but there is much that fails to mesmerize (see Mes-mer's magnetic theory). In contrast to her husband's illustrations, Nancy Sorel treats her subjects blandly. "Lord Cardigan (of sweater fame) took as his third wife the beautiful Adeline de Horsey. They lived happily together until he died at the age of 71 of injuries he received when he fell from his horse." Too bad as well that the writers bypass the kind of speculation that occurs to the reader immediately. Leopold von Sacher-Masoch might just as easily have given us sacherism as masochism.
So useful a book should certainly not be boycotted. In fact, as Mrs. Malaprop, that endearing eponymous personage might have said, "The authors have led the way and the pillologists and parrotists shall have pun preceding."
ANGLE OF REPOSE by Wallace Stegner. 569 pages. Doubleday. $7.95.