BOOKS
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behalf of an intense observation of common life. Things do, how–
ever, happen to him. Drifting to Rome, he holds a temporary job as
a tourist guide, suffers a broken love affair, experiences the sadness
of unfulfilled friendship. This novel, in its most attractive aspect,
moves along as a munnur of reflection, but M. Curvers is enough
of a craftsman to know that he must also provide occasional bits of
incident. He then breaks the quiet surface of his prose and moves
sharply into moments of contrast and significant behavior: a very
funny and sad examination in which Jimmy, to hold his miserable
job, must be tested on the history of Italian art; a grotesque and
lurid masque enacted on the Appian Way, in which the implica–
tions of the novel are doubled and sharpened; and most impressive
of all, scenes in which an English eccentric, Sir Craven, moves to
the forefront, slowly to persuade us that generosity of spirit can
survive in any body and through any mode of experience.
If
I praise
Tempo di Roma
as a novel of sensibility, I must
hasten to add that it is not at all the claustrophobic feminine kind
of sensibility with which we have become familiar in recent fiction.
The narrator-Jimmy-Curvers--seeks not to absorb the world as a
datum of his perception, but to encounter it and then move back
from it.
About
The Marquise of
O-there is so much to be said that a
mere reviewer, harried for space, feels no obligation to try. The
most important fart to note is that these remarkable stories are now
available in English, carefully translated and introduced by Martin
Greenberg.
Kleist's narratives are not really stories in the modem sense.
They do not, as a rule, peg their entire implication on a single
revelatory incident; they never seek to release meanings through an
evocation of psychic or sensuous mood; they are usually sparing in
the use of dialogue; and they seldom pretend to be dealing with
familiar social existence. They are really tales or novellas which
compress an enonnous amount of narrative material, often suffi–
cient for a full-length novel, into a short space. Characteristically,
they seize upon some extraordinary event, some moment of the
marvelous, by means of which Kleist can blend effects of the heroic
and the fearful, the power of action and the uncertainty of value.
Often this extraordinary event consists of some extreme catastrophe
