New Storyteller

THE DREAM AND THE DESERT (223 pp.) --Uys Krige--Houghton Mifflin ($3).

In fiction, as in business, there is always room at the top. Just as South African writers are on the point of becoming a drug on the book market, along comes Cape Towner Uys Krige (44) with a collection of short stories as good as any current in English. They are stories about South Africa that do not. blessedly, derive from the headlines, and war tales that are moving without resorting to war-fiction language and cliches. One or two are complete failures. But the two best ones make it plain that Author Krige is more than promising: 1) The Dream, which lyrically describes a happy young boy's bewilderment when death robs him of his favorite aunt and cousins, then takes his baby brother as well; 2) The Coffin, a fine yarn about a virile old South African farmer and great-grandfather who always had his own expensive coffin ready and waiting in the storeroom. One after another, he gave away several of them to less hardy contemporaries, was caught short without one when his own death came.

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