Unamunity

THREE EXEMPLARY NOVELS--Miguel de Unamuno--Boni ($2.50).

Unamuno, a great name in Spain, famed throughout Europe, is not so well known in the U. S. Most religious of philosophers, most passionate of professors. Unamuno's earnestness and energy are untypical of Spain, his violent, rebellious liberalism untypical of his academic profession. Unamuno looks at life passionately and sees it as a tragedy. Says he, in the prologue to Three Exemplary Novels: "I believe the curve of the hyperbole strives -- just so! to join with its asymptote, and strives in vain; and I believe that if the geometrician were to be conscious of his hopeless and desperate striving ... he would represent the hyperbole to us as a living being and a tragic one. I believe in the tragedy (in the romance) of the binomial theorem (I am not so sure that Newton saw it)." The novels (short stories) in this book are not exemplary in the conventional moral sense, but examples of tragic human characters, tragic situations. The two daughters of a grim old grandee fall in love with the same man; he seduces the older before he marries the younger, and his two children grow up to fill his house with hate. Don Juan, lover of the childless widow Raquel, marries Berta to become a father, becomes instead the jealously guarded child of both women. A self-made man marries the daughter of an impoverished business acquaintance; she eventually falls in love with him, he will never admit that he loves her. But when she dies, he kills himself.

The Author. Miguel de Unamuno, onetime rector of the University of Sala manca (Spain's oldest), great philosopher of Spain, bitter enemy of the recent dictatorship, was banished by the late Dicta tor Primo de Rivera, spent six years in exile in France. Last February Primo de Rivera fell, an amnesty was declared (TIME, Feb. 10), Unamuno returned to Spain. Said he: "I return to work for the Spanish Republic!" Home only a few weeks, he was attacked by a savage dog in Zamora, had his left arm broken, his right hand badly torn.

Tall, sinewy, with iron-grey hair, pointed beard, high cheekbones, keen, kind eyes behind his scholar's spectacles, Philosopher Unamuno is a mystic but no wishy-washy one. Says he: "I have put passion into my books--the passion of hatred, the passion of disdain, the passion of contempt!'' He is married. "Like my Basque country, I have no history, or rather it is all purely internal. Since my birth in Bilbao on the 29th of September 1864 of a Basque family, nothing has happened to me that can interest a reader. ... As to my internal life of storm and longings, of constant metaphysical and religious crises, it is scattered through my writings."

Other books: The Tragic Sense of Life, The Agony of Christianity, Mist, Essays and Soliloquies.

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