Mixed Fiction

MASTRO-DON GESUALDO, by Giovanni Verga (454 pp.; Grove Press; $3.50) is now reissued in the U.S. for the first time in 20 years. When D. H. Lawrence, who translated the book from the Italian, first discovered the works of Giovanni Verga, he wrote enthusiastically: "He is extraordinarily good--peasant--quite modern--Homeric . . ." Best known outside Italy for a minor work--his story Cavalleria Rusticana, on which the libretto for Mascagni's opera was based--Author Verga ranks second only to Manzoni among Italian novelists. Born in Sicily in 1840, he planned as his major work a kind of Comedie Humaine of Sicilian life of which Gesualdo is the second installment (the first: The House by the Medlar Tree --TIME, May 4, 1953)

Gesualdo is a village-eye view of the drama that fascinated other 19th century novelists, including Balzac: the drama of a society in which the aristocracy is withering, while the middle class and even the peasantry are elbowing their way into the mirrored halls. The book's hero is a harddriving, shrewd peasant who grows rich, to the dismay of the seedy local gentry. The story is chiefly concerned with the battle between tough, energetic Mastro-don Gesualdo and that gentry--with the rich ones who connive to block his designs on their dwindling lands, with the impoverished ones who sneer at his peasant origins while scheming to trap him into marriage with their daughters. The dialogue may be racy in Italian, but in Lawrence's English it comes out as a series of blurted phrases overloaded with sarcasm and exclamation points. It all seems as noisy as an Italian kitchen when the pasta has boiled over on the baby. But Novelist Verga tells his story with a superb eye for the beauty and squalor of his Sicilian village--its busybody priest scurrying among the decaying mansions and their decaying inhabitants, its restive peasantry caught up in their inept revolutions.

THE FLIGHT INTO EGYPT, by Jean Bloch-Michel (215 pp.; Scrlbner; $3) is the story of Pierre, his wife and children--fugitives from an unnamed city in an unnamed war. They settled in a distant Alpine village where only lost and famished animals roamed the streets; the human inhabitants had been driven into slavery by the enemy. It was like being the last people on earth. But Pierre's family was no cheerful, God-fearing Swiss Family Robinson. They had no religion, no clear rules for living. Down below, Pierre knew, men were fighting and dying. Did he have the right to withdraw from the slaughter?

The Flight into Egypt is a book of ideas by a man of action. Author Jean Bloch-Michel, 43, was a French soldier in World War II and a resistance fighter. But in this book, war is simply used as a dark backdrop for the drama of a family, stripped to its barest elements--man, woman, boy, girl. Their problems are ordinary, but there is no chance for the ordinary relief from them--the distractions and consolations of society. Pierre and Yvonne feel isolated even from each other. The children become alien to them, withdraw into themselves.

In the end, Yvonne finally finds faith, "a feeling of confidence and the conviction that there existed some unknown power in which she could find repose,'' a comforting certainty that "the future did not, after all, lie in her hands." But Pierre feels that the world is only what man makes of it. He depends wholly on his own resources. Theirs were two common responses to the 20th century--the religious and the existentialist. The Flight into Egypt is nearly monotone in color, and the characters are so universal that sometimes they can scarcely be recognized as individuals. But Author Bloch-Michel asks many moving questions about life. His one sure answer: escape is no solution, for no one can remain long above the battle.

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