Books in Brief

The Diary of “Helena Morley,” translated from the Portuguese by Elizabeth Bishop (Farrar, $4.75). “Helena Morley” is the pseudonym of a lady whose grandfather settled in Brazil one hundred years ago to serve as doctor in a small diamond-mining town deep in the interior. Her diary is an actual document, kept for three years in her teens; and since it was published in Brazil in 1942, it has been praised throughout the Hispanic world as one of those true “sports” of literature. What makes it exceptional (Bernanos compared it to Rimbaud’s poems) is not its particulars of life in a remote mountain village in 1893, but the quicksilver temperament of the narrator. At twelve, there is a purity of vision and a canniness of understanding which very rarely get into words, and which even the greatest poets cannot simulate. There is enough awareness to see, but not enough to inhibit. This is the vantage point “Helena Morley” writes from, and her diary is the sort of book Colette’s Claudine might have produced had she never gone to Paris and infected her innocence with its grivoiseries. Every page, in Elizabeth Bishop’s empathic rendering, is as fresh, pertinent and uncoerced as a plum blossom in the Garden of Eden. I almost wished that, instead of to a happy marriage, the author had gone on to write fifty novels. r. phelps

Modern Miraculous Cures, by Dr. François Leuret and Dr. Henri Bon, translated by Dr. A. T. Mac- queen and the Rev. John C. Barry (Farrar, $3.50). The authors report with adequate medical detail an impressively large number of physiological miracles observed at Lourdes and other Catholic shrines. In each case pathological conditions which had been diagnosed by reputable physicians were cured by physiologically inexplicable but unmistakable phenomena, such as the almost instantaneous regeneration of tissue or bone, or the almost instantaneous disappearance of large tumors and oedemata, which were verified by prompt medical examination. r. p. Oliver

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The Diary of “Helena Morley,” translated from the Portuguese by Elizabeth Bishop (Farrar, $4.75). “Helena Morley” is the pseudonym of a lady whose grandfather settled in Brazil one hundred years ago to serve as doctor in a small diamond-mining town deep in the interior. Her diary is an actual document, kept for three years in her teens; and since it was published in Brazil in 1942, it has been praised throughout the Hispanic world as one of those true “sports” of literature. What makes it exceptional (Bernanos compared it to Rimbaud’s poems) is not its particulars of life in a remote mountain village in 1893, but the quicksilver temperament of the narrator. At twelve, there is a purity of vision and a canniness of understanding which very rarely get into words, and which even the greatest poets cannot simulate. There is enough awareness to see, but not enough to inhibit. This is the vantage point “Helena Morley” writes from, and her diary is the sort of book Colette’s Claudine might have produced had she never gone to Paris and infected her innocence with its grivoiseries. Every page, in Elizabeth Bishop’s empathic rendering, is as fresh, pertinent and uncoerced as a plum blossom in the Garden of Eden. I almost wished that, instead of to a happy marriage, the author had gone on to write fifty novels. r. phelps

Modern Miraculous Cures, by Dr. François Leuret and Dr. Henri Bon, translated by Dr. A. T. Mac- queen and the Rev. John C. Barry (Farrar, $3.50). The authors report with adequate medical detail an impressively large number of physiological miracles observed at Lourdes and other Catholic shrines. In each case pathological conditions which had been diagnosed by reputable physicians were cured by physiologically inexplicable but unmistakable phenomena, such as the almost instantaneous regeneration of tissue or bone, or the almost instantaneous disappearance of large tumors and oedemata, which were verified by prompt medical examination. r. p. Oliver