KOBO ABÉ’S new novel, THE FACE OF ANOTHER (Knopf, $4.95), concerns an industrial scientist whose face has been so scarred in a laboratory accident that he is driven to construct a mask. He does it in secret, with the intention of acquiring a new identity, but succeeds only in becoming thoroughly confused about the nature of identity. The action of the novel becomes an interplay of masks rather than of human beings, but it is, thanks to the acute intelligence of the author, as exciting on its metaphysical level as conventional blood and thunder.
A first novel by SEAN HIGNETT, A PICTURE TO HANG ON THE WALL (Coward-McCann, $5.95), is promising, amusing, and disappointing, It derives from James Joyce via J. P. Donleavy with a nod to Jack Kerouac, and reports the amorous and alcoholic misadventures of a young Liverpool Irishman. Mr. Hignett shows great ingenuity in the invention of dialogue and incident. He has, unfortunately, nothing new to say about his characters, who prove to be the same not-quite-juvenile malcontents who have drifted about in fiction for the past fifteen years, no better and no worse for turning up in Liverpool.
MARGARET LAURENCE’S A JEST OF GOD (Knopf, $4.95) is written in the continuous present, a device that leads to narrative like “My drawing away is sharp, violent. I feel violated. . . .” If the reader can stand this style, to which I must admit an entrenched antipathy, the novel turns out to be a plausible, ironically sympathetic study of the partial thawing out of a shy, stiff, mamaridden old-maid schoolteacher.
Seven years ago in a small town in Ontario, a twelve-year-old girl was raped and murdered and a boy of fourteen was convicted of the crime and sentenced to life imprisonment. ISABEL LEBOURDAIS, journalist and incidentally the daughter of a lawyer, has written THE TRIAL OF STEVEN TRUSCOTT (Lippincott, $4.95) in protest against what she believes to have been an improper police investigation, a dubiously correct trial, and an unjust sentence. The information that she supplies supports all these contentions with horrifying persuasiveness. One of the oddest aspects of the case is that although the murder occurred alongside a military base, the civilian authorities seem never to have considered the possibility of an adult killer lurking among the inevitably hotchpotch, semi-anonymous personnel there.
In CRETE (World, $10.00), the Greek archaeologist NICOLAS PLATON offers a careful, conservative summary of the current state of knowledge about Minoan civilization. The fine color illustrations include many pieces from the palace of Zakro, which Mr. Platon has been excavating for several years. Zakro, unlike the palaces previously dug out on Crete, was not burned, and although Mr. Platon has not yet found the documents that all Minoan scholars dream of, he has found objects of great beauty.
BONNARD (New York Graphic Society, $27.50) is a lovely muddle of a book. It begins with a dialogue in which the critics Jean Cassou and Raymond Cogniat attempt to define the content of Bonnard’s painting and relate it to both the artist’s time and the development of European art. This dialogue, which occupies hardly ten pages, is as illuminating as most full-length books on the subject. There follows a memoir by Annette Vaillant, who was born into the fringes of the Nabi circle and recalls Bonnard, Sérusier, Vuillard, and their friends as the normal background of her childhood. The book ends with notes on certain paintings by Hans R. Hahnloser, whose family were among Bonnard’s patrons. The result of these three approaches is a lively portrait of a quiet man. The book is thick with color reproductions and Bonnard’s slyly witty sketches.
Bonnard was among the victims of that famous party at which TOULOUSE-LAUTREC prostrated artistic Paris with cocktails of his own invention. In addition to being an awe-inspiring barkeep, Lautrec was an accomplished and inventive cook, a fact charmingly commemorated by THE ART OF CUISINE (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, $15.00). This is a discreetly modernized and elaborated version of the book of Lautrec’s recipes — collected or devised — originally published by his friend Maurice Joyant. Ornamented with Lautrec’s sketches and full of enticing possibilities.