Books in Brief

House Without A Roof, by Maurice Hindus (Doubleday, $6.95). This is Maurice Hindus’ twentieth book, all of them on Russia and most of them employing the “I was there” technique. He is still supporting the thesis that we are living in an age of peasant—not proletarian—revolutions; but the real stuff of the work is his almost incredible ability to meet all sorts of Soviet citizens and to recall his conversations with them in elaborate detail. In this book, based upon visits to the USSR in 1958 and 1960, he is deeply impressed by changes, almost all of them for the better, he maintains, which he has discovered there. While he doesn’t neglect the seamy side (Lenin’s comment on the peasant that “Either we choke him or he chokes us,” the continuing mistreatment of Jews, etc.), the emphasis is on the “improvements.” The reader will probably enjoy this skillfully written book but will agree less with Hindus about how good things are than with the Russian woman who told him, “We are happy that things are quiet now, but we have no assurance that the purges won’t recur.” w. D. JACOBS

Poems, by George Seferis, translated by Rex Warner (Little, Brown, $3.75). George Seferis is the Greek ambassador to London, living a double life as diplomat-poet, like Claudel. And as Claudel is haunted by the great cathedrals of France, Seferis is pursued by the ancient Furies and classical Helen. He writes of waking from a dream to find a marble head in his hands, a burden and badge of honor that he must carry with him through life, forever asking it unanswered questions: “I peer into the eyes, neither shut nor open, I speak to the mouth which is always trying to speak.” That poem cannily sounds its own sources; and limns, with a push against them, its own limits. All the work of Seferis has the strength, yet the self-trammeling quality, of obsessive memory— giving the poems, ultimately, a dream-like sameness. But it is a dream all Western men must share, a burden that we find in our hands when we wake.g. wills

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House Without A Roof, by Maurice Hindus (Doubleday, $6.95). This is Maurice Hindus’ twentieth book, all of them on Russia and most of them employing the “I was there” technique. He is still supporting the thesis that we are living in an age of peasant—not proletarian—revolutions; but the real stuff of the work is his almost incredible ability to meet all sorts of Soviet citizens and to recall his conversations with them in elaborate detail. In this book, based upon visits to the USSR in 1958 and 1960, he is deeply impressed by changes, almost all of them for the better, he maintains, which he has discovered there. While he doesn’t neglect the seamy side (Lenin’s comment on the peasant that “Either we choke him or he chokes us,” the continuing mistreatment of Jews, etc.), the emphasis is on the “improvements.” The reader will probably enjoy this skillfully written book but will agree less with Hindus about how good things are than with the Russian woman who told him, “We are happy that things are quiet now, but we have no assurance that the purges won’t recur.” w. D. JACOBS

Poems, by George Seferis, translated by Rex Warner (Little, Brown, $3.75). George Seferis is the Greek ambassador to London, living a double life as diplomat-poet, like Claudel. And as Claudel is haunted by the great cathedrals of France, Seferis is pursued by the ancient Furies and classical Helen. He writes of waking from a dream to find a marble head in his hands, a burden and badge of honor that he must carry with him through life, forever asking it unanswered questions: “I peer into the eyes, neither shut nor open, I speak to the mouth which is always trying to speak.” That poem cannily sounds its own sources; and limns, with a push against them, its own limits. All the work of Seferis has the strength, yet the self-trammeling quality, of obsessive memory— giving the poems, ultimately, a dream-like sameness. But it is a dream all Western men must share, a burden that we find in our hands when we wake.g. wills