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Salient. An Organ of Student Opinion at Victoria College, Wellington, N.Z Vol. 3, No. 5.

Book Review — Karel Capek "The First Rescue Party."

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Book Review

Karel Capek "The First Rescue Party."

"That breathless, innocent style of Capek's, like that of a boy who has seen something delightful and cannot rest till he has told you of it" (as the Manchester Guardian has aptly put it) is even more than usually appropriate to his latest novel. The translators M. & R. Weatherall, have retained the essential spirit of the author, and have retained also that quiant flavour peculiar to Continental writers as contrasted to those of England & America — a flavour that seems to enhance the Czech setting.

There is little story, but the book has a quality that grips one while reading it, and that ripens in retrospect. "The First rescue party" is not a psychological novel, in the popular, sense, but its very being depends upon the intense psychological insight that was so much a part of Karol Capek.

The hero is a youth of 18, a miner, with a little education and a romantic and imaginative temperament. He is obviously destined to be more than a more miner, but equally obviously may never rise above his present level. His hunger for life and his capacity for hero-worship, the stirrings of adolescent love and his concern about the marital relations of the couple in whose house he ledges, are all finely portrayed, making Standa a vital and familiar character: a character as typical of New Zealand as of [unclear: Czechoslovakia].

A mine disaster, and Standa's almost involuntary heroism in the first rescue party, and the consequences, give wider scope than that afforded by his normal life, for an incisive analysis of the boy's actions and emotions. Capek's description of the scenes far underground, when the lives of the whole rescue party are in danger along with those they are hoping to rescue, has a taut reality that is convincing to a degree, and is largely achieved by his concentration on essential details and emotional stress.

This is a book quite out of the ordinary run: it is not a book to skim lightly through, and perhaps it can scarcely be described as pleasant reading - possibly because it is too near life for that. But it is well worth reading. And I think it is a book one will remember.

("The First Rescue Party", by Karel Capek. George Allen and Unwin. 1939. 10/6d. From Modern Books).

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