Recent & Readable

FANDANGO--Robed Briffault--Scribner's ($2.50). Because a few years ago many reviewers would not call a rotten book rotten--or couldn't get the scent--if its politics were Left, Anthropologist Robert Briffault developed an extraordinary reputation through his first novel, Europa, scarcely diminished it with Europa in Limbo. Robert Forsythe wrote of him, in New Masses: "I not only consider him the most brilliant writer in the English language today but by long odds the most learned and profound man of our time." Briffault's third novel, Fandango, is shorter and a little less pretentious than the others. In every other respect it is like them. Nominally the story of Beautiful Carlotta von Goerlitz and of what she sees in Spain on the eve of Civil War, in Vienna after Anschluss, in Paris as an exile, it is actually a series of very moderately intelligent travel and political notes, held together by stock characters, decorated by eroticisms, seasoned with high-school cynicism, anger, iconoclastic irony. Net effect: like a drugstore translation of the Decameron by Weber & Fields.

THE SALVATION OF Pisco GABAR--Geoffrey Household -- Little, Brown ($2.50). By the author of Rogue Male, twelve short stories as pungent as good Maugham, with at least one staggering piece of condensation: " 'I blame nobody,' said Gabar. 'We are animals. Will you have a drink?'

I Go HORIZONTAL--Duff Gilfond--Vanguard ($2.50). Onetime Reporter Gil-fond tells with harrowing gaiety of a ten-year fight against encephalitis lethargica ("sleeping sickness"), which in her case took the form of a constant headache so painful that she had to lie down almost all the time. Her descriptions of variously officious, honest, cruel, experimental or decent specialists and the hospital experiences she had in their charge manage to be funny in spite of everything.

THE GOOD OLD DAYS--David L. Cohn --Simon & Schuster ($3.75). Dressed up in a period-smirk jacket, David Cohn's volume is an analysis of three decades (1905-35) of U. S. living. Mr. Cohn got his material from a book which he recognizes as one of the most valuable and beautiful of U. S. documents: the Sears, Roebuck catalogue. The materials he handles are incorruptibly good, but his tireless facetiousness is tiresome. Fair enough as a 579-page guidebook and commentary, The Good Old Days is not in the same class with any one issue of the catalogue itself.

CHAD HANNA--Walter D. Edmonds --Little, Brown ($2.75). Another long (548-page), affable, remunerative haul along the Erie Canal. This one is about an orphanage runaway who picks up with Huguenine's Great and Only International Circus in 1836. Harmless, built-to-please, as neat and mild as a good carpenter's shavings.

TITANIC -- Robert Prechtl -- Dutton ($2.50). The story of S. S. Titanic, is one long frenzy of symbolic possibilities. No Melville but murderously in earnest, Prechtl makes a sort of Tamburlaine of John Jacob Astor, constructs a magnificent tear-jerker about the aged Isidore Straus. To these creatures of fact he adds tons of Sunday-Supplement material (melodrama, pseudoscience, a malign diamond), a few moments of near-grandeur.

HARDY OF WESSEX--Carl J. Weber--Columbia University Press ($3). Centennial biography of the great tragic English novelist, which traces the originals of Hardy's Wessex characters. Hardy of Wessex offers an excellent dossier on Hardy's weaknesses--his melodramatics, re-use of plots, gnarled syntax, dullnesses--gives only a fuzzy clue to the central Hardy enigma: How, out of his sardonic imagination and crabbed style, could come scenes so vivid, characters so memorable?

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