BY PHOEBE ADAMS
In NIMRUD AND ITS REMAINS (Dodd, Mead, 2 vols., $60.00), Professor M. E. L. MALLOWAN has produced a scholarly record of his long excavation of this Assyrian fortress town and has also provided, for the envious amateur, the next best thing to permission to loiter underfoot on an archaeological dig. His method is, I think, very nearly perfect for this sort of book. He begins with his reasons for examining Nimrud, describes local conditions, and then settles into a straightforward narrative of how the excavating was done and what was found. As each item turns up, Professor Mallowan digresses to explain what is known of this class of object and what his particular find implies. One learns, among other odd and amusing things, that Assyrian kings had trouble with their mail service (snow in the mountains) and their tax collection (“His Majesty’s Commissioner of Inland Revenue was killed by the populace in Tyre”), and that the Phoenicians sold into Assyria Egyptian art works of total and splendid fraudulence. The remarkable ivory carvings found at Nimrud are beautifully reproduced, and the book carries a fine supply of maps, plans, and conjectural reconstructions, but no list of kings.
MICHAEL CHAPLIN’S I COULDN’T SMOKE THE GRASS ON MY FATHER’S LAWN (Putnam, $4.95) is the autobiography of an allegedly reformed pot-smoking beatnik, and most of it is infinitely less amusing than the title. It does reveal the confusion of mind that can overtake a young person maintained as a kind of domestic showpiece like modern paintings and antique furniture.
OMENSETTER’S LUCK (New American Library, $5.95), by WILLIAM H. GASS, is a novel in which manner rather outweighs content. Mr. Gass’s prose owes something to Joyce and a great deal to late Faulkner. I believe I also detect the subliminal presence of Laurence Sterne, W. S. Gilbert, and John Donne. This list does not include authors quoted or paraphrased with the intent to provoke recognition. Mr. Gass, in short, has made ingenious use of much reading to create a style that is always striking and sometimes, when he depends on his own wit, strikingly original. The tale Mr. Gass tells represents the bitter incompatibility between the naturally good and happy man — the noble savage — and a society corrupted by greed, physical weakness, intellectual arrogance, and sexual frustration — the perverse parson. It seems to me I have met this theme before.
TARJEI VESAAS is a Norwegian author who has won the Venice Prize and the Nordic Council Literary Prize. His two long short stories, THE SEED and SPRING NIGHT (American-Scandinavian Foundation, $5.50), have been translated by Kenneth C. Chapman, and like Mr. Gass’s novel, they are concerned with evil and the devious complications of society. There similarity ends, for Mr. Vesaas presents no noble savages and sees evil as a natural force, like weather, which must be coped with when it appears. The disaster of The Seed starts off, in a scene of lumbering bucolic slapstick, with some hysterical pigs; and the little boy who, in Spring Night, is abruptly confronted with all the crises of adult life is inexperienced rather than innocent. Mr. Vesaas’ blunt, unemotional style makes the outlandish plausible, and both these stories are, in retrospect, extremely outlandish combinations of comedy, brutality, and coincidence. They read like the most reasonable fact.
NIRAD C. CHAUDHURI, an Indian journalist, overhauls his country in THE CONTINENT OF CIRCE (Oxford University Press, $7.00). The book is written with cantankerous elegance, is full of unorthodox ideas, and attributes India’s troubles to the fact that most of its population consists of what are still, after more than 2000 years, displaced Europeans, their complexions, digestions, and wits deranged by the climate in which their ancestors misguidedly settled.
DAVID LAVENDER reconstructs the causes and early events of the Mexican War in CLIMAX AT BUENA VISTA (Lippincott, $4.50). The story is intricate, involving political squabbles in both countries as well as the mutually improvised military campaign, and Mr. Lavender disentangles things with great skill until he reaches Buena Vista, which was fought on terrain calculated to defeat any author’s powers of description.