Good Books

Good Books

The following estimates of books much in the public eye were made after careful consideration of the trend of critical opinion: WHOSE BODY? -Dorothy L. Sayers -Boni and Liveright ($2.00). A respectable little London architect wakes up one morning to dis- cover the body of an unknown Israelite, nude except for a pair of gold pince-nez, in his bathtub. Whose body? And who is responsible for its presence there? The police, as usual, bungle the matter, but Lord Peter Wimsey, a delightfully indolent young clubman, assisted by the usual Watson and a splendidly upstage butler named Bunter, at last discovers the solution not only to this problem but others involving much mystery and confusion. The best thing of its kind since The Red House Mystery. MY FRIEND FROM LIMOUSIN -Jean Giraudoux -Harper ($2.00). Awarded the Prix Balzac for 1922, this highly original and satiric novel, should prove a most acceptable literary plate of anchovy sandwiches for those who like a certain fantastic grace and suppleness in their reading matter. The plot -involving a Frenchman picked up on the battlefield, who suffers complete loss of memory, recovers in a German hospital, is mistaken for a German and becomes a leader of post-war German thought, only to be discovered in the end by a former friend and brought back to France and his original identity -sounds somewhat like the skeleton for an ephillipsop-penheim spine-shocker. But again, as in Suzanne and the Pacific, the style is the book -as sparkling, unique and gracile as Venetian glass. The translation by Louise Collier Willcox is fairly adequate though sometimes erratic. SINBAD -C. Kay Scott--Seltzer ($2.00). Greenwich Village -studio-parties - pseudo-intellectuals whose amatory affairs are as tangled as a pile of jackstraws -burbles about Art -neuroses and inhibitions -take-offs on prominent Village characters, et cetera, et cetera. All well enough done -with tact, occasional wit and a sense of construction. The trouble with it is that the author succeeds in making that kind of thing seem so completely unimportant that one gets wondering why the book should have been written at all. Still, as a sincere if at times some-what tedious portrayal of a partic-ular angle of hobohemia, it is recommended to those who still con-sider Greenwich Village a cross between the court of Nero and the Mermaid Tavern. LANTY HANLON -Patrick MacGill -Harper ($1.90). A broth of a boy was Lanty Hanlon, G. H., from the time when he was christened -in whiskey -to the time when he tossed a coin -" Heads I marry her, tails I don't." Abundance of Irish peasantry, family feuds, feasts, fights, fires.