Silk Purse

SEVEN POOR MEN OF SYDNEY--Christina Stead--Appleton-Century ($2.50).

Few U. S. readers, fewer critics, picked out of the spate of last year's novels a rich and strange book called The Salzburg Tales, by an unknown Australian author named Christina Stead. With her second, published last week, she made the oversight more remarkable. A needlewoman of extraordinary skill, she has made a lavishly embroidered silk purse out of the sow's ear of realism.

This story of contemporary Sydney is not so much a novel as an interrelated series of portraits; the portraits are not so much human likenesses as translations into brilliant descriptive talk of different types of human problems. Her characters are mostly riff-raff but gloriously magnified and particularized into heroic proportions: Michael, the burnt-out veteran of 32; Baruch, the philosopher of the one-horse printshop; Catherine, the virgin in search of an angel; Chamberlain, the cheerfully hopeless incompetent businessman; Tom Withers, the intelligently rat-minded foreman. Only ordinary character in the book is Joseph, whose very ordinariness lights up the grotesque genius of his companions, casts a reflected light on himself. Says he to himself, out of his bewilderment: "Here all these months have gone past and they are still talking a lingo that has no meaning to me. But why should I learn it? They are all throwing fits and I am calm, a dummy, but calm."

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