Other formats

    Adobe Portable Document Format file (facsimile images)   TEI XML file   ePub eBook file  

Connect

    mail icontwitter iconBlogspot iconrss icon

Salient. An Organ of Student Opinion at Victoria College, Wellington, N.Z. Vol. 5, No. 7. September 24, 1942

Book Review

Book Review

"My Sister Eileen"—Ruth McKenny.

Ruth McKenny is pleased with life, world may make, she will cut through it bringing joy, faith and affirmation in life itself.

In her "Industrial Valley," perhaps the most brilliant reportage ever to come out of America, she plunged into the chaos of housing, the tragedy of the unemployed, and came up with not only a terrible factual indictment out also a warm piece of history that breathed its ultimate faith in the people. An associate editor of the long [unclear: ramous] "New Masses," her articles covering all American life, her commentaries on international affairs have evidenced the same charm and warmth.

Now in "My Sister Eileen she goes back to the days of childhood and adolescence. It is a time of laughter—for the reader. She and her sister have one simple motif—they like what they like, and they don't like what they don't like. There is nothing perverse about it—it is the forth rightness of children. They judged their films by the tears they shed—no tears, no good; bird-nesting with a group of girls they disliked, led to childish gangsterism; they suffered near drowning as corpses in life-saving; dashed doting parents' hopes to the ground by their theatrical performances, hunted for socks with Randolph Churchill in his bedroom, were cottoned onto by the Brazilian Navy, and they did all this and more with laughter in their hearts.

It's an education on how to live cleanly.

For two years now blase New York has seen if as a stage presentation, and now Hollywood is reported to have bought the film rights. Road it and you will know why.

"The Moon is Down"

—John Steinbeck.

Mr. Steinbeck's latest novel deals with the occupation by the Nazis of a town in some country such as Norway and the subsequent resistance of the population. Unfortunately despite some moving passages, it does not escape the dangers which may await any work concerned with a situation about which the author may have strong feelings but of which he may have no immediate experience. Thus the characters for the most part remain types father than individuals and do not transcend their functions as well chosen symbols illustrating a rather dubious thesis. This thesis—that the German occupation of Europe is the "flies' conquest of the fly-paper" and doomed to failure from the very nature of the relationship between the occupying forces and the subject population—is of a character that aggravates certain faults which a novel of this kind must for see in any case. Thus it is necessary for Steinbeck's purpose to show the older German officers as amiable and somewhat ineffective persons and in the description of a neurotic young Nazi—to show the weakness that lies at the root of the neurosis, but not the strength that is, in such cases, its horrible result. These and similar distortions make it possible for Steinbeck to treat in terms of melodrama a situation which is really too deeply tragic to be expressed in such a form.