THE ROOTS OF HEAVEN, by Remain Gary. The hero of this startling and moving novel crusades to save the elephants of Equatorial Africa from extinction; for to him they seem the last living symbols of freedom in a world determined to enslave itself. Not many writers could have conceived this jarring parable of liberty, and fewer still could have brought it off with French Novelist Gary's brilliance.
HOME FROM THE HILL, by William Humphrey. A carefully written story of a young man who bitterly discovers the dead rot at the heart of his parents' lives. The book offers a tense evocation of small-town Texas life and a sense of personal tragedy that borders on myth. Faulkner without the undergrowth.
A GLASS ROSE, by Richard Bankowsky. In a year of good first novels, this one tried for much and achieved most of it. A grim, sadly true story of family disintegration in which a Polish immigrant father is brought to despair and hands on a shameful legacy to his daughter.
THE TEN THOUSAND THINGS, by Maria Dermoût. Dutch Author Dermoût was 67 when she wrote her first novel. Locale: a strange world she intimately knew—the islands of Indonesia. Curious, bathed in memory and completely original, the book merges white and native existence in beautiful language, washes against the senses like an insistent tropical swell.
A PLACE WITHOUT TWILIGHT, by Peter S. Feibleman. Another first novel and one that makes a daring foray into uncertain ground. White Author Feibleman deals with a New Orleans Negro family that is more oppressed by black ignorance than by white prejudice. His success is startling, though not total.
THE STARS GROW PALE, by Karl Bjarnhof. Written by a Danish author and musician, who is himself blind, Bjarnhof's fictional memoir of a boy gradually losing his sight is steadily touching, not once sentimental. In it, blindness leads to selfdiscovery, and when music fills the boy's dark world, it is as if he had won a major victory.
THE MAGIC BARREL, by Bernard Malamud. A fine collection of short stories of which only two or three fail to click. They are strung on the theme that the good one man does to another forever enslaves the donor to the fate of the receiver. Most of the characters are Jewish, some of the developments are fantastic, and even the most commonplace of Malamud's yarns has an air of accidental fantasy.
TWO WOMEN, by Alberto Moravia. For once, Italy's best writer seems to say that sex is not the most urgent business of mankind. His heroines (or victims) are a widowed mother and her daughter trying to find a quiet place to sit out the war. They are ill-used in turn by fellow countrymen so rude and crude that only a fellow Italian would dare describe them. Finally they return to Rome with wounds deeper than those they thought to escape.
THE KING MUST DIE, by Mary Renault. No great novelist but an eminently able literary archaeologist, Author Renault dug up the year's best piece of historical fiction. Her telling of the bloody Theseus story and her meticulously detailed view of ancient Mediterranean life is a notable achievement.