Before Stalingrad

THE WORLD'S LAST CORNER (295 pp.)--Theodor Plievier--Appleton-Century-Crofts ($3).

In Stalingrad (TIME, Nov. 1, 1948), Theodor Plievier, German novelist, wrote what still remains the most powerful novel of World War II. Leaning on that fact, his U.S. publishers have now issued an "adaptation" of two earlier Plievier novels written in the '30s, and called it The World's Last Corner. The stories, clumsily adapted, add nothing to the reputation of the man who wrote Stalingrad, but they have several lively moments, and show something of what Plievier was up to before the Wehrmacht rolled into Russia.

Actually, The World's Last Corner is a picaresque novel with the juice squeezed out. The traditional picaresque offers a rogue-hero merrily breaking social conventions to rise from squalor to respectability; Plieviers hero, Wenzel, is more victim than rogue -- a seafaring, 20th Century Everyman who breaks the laws of society only because he wants to eat.

When Wenzel jumps ship at the South American port of Caleta Colosal, he feels he has reached the world's dead end. It suits him well enough; through hard work and corner-cutting, he is soon the owner of a small fishery. But his business and his hopes go smash when he runs head-on into the big Nitra mining company, which bosses the country. Wenzel has to leave Caleta Colosal because he has persuaded the Nitra workers to strike for 10 pesos more a day. But, like Hemingway's hero in For Whom the Bell Tolls, he has learned a lesson in human solidarity: "No one can celebrate a feast day by himself."

Part Two of Plievier's story picks up Wenzel, again flat broke, in another South American port. He wanders into the waterfront dive run by Milly, a "shark" who helps shanghai drunken sailors into freighter crews. Wenzel's young face and smooth muscles soften Milly's heart; as she liquors up a crew for a wretched guano ship, she decides to save him for herself. But Wenzel refuses the favor and takes his place with his tricked and sodden buddies.

The best things in The World's Last Corner are incidental: scenes of illegal night fishing with dynamite, a Sunday dinner at the Caleta Colosal Hotel, the all-night "party" from which Milly gets her crew. As a story of sailors on the beach, the book is entirely convincing, but as the social parable for which Plievier was aiming it does not come off. Hero Wenzel is simply too dull for the conclusions Plievier puts in his mouth.

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