Island of the Year

TALE OF BALI--Vicki Baum--Double-day, Doran ($2.75).

Thanks to the tradition founded by Gauguin, Tahiti was for several generations the most famed South Sea island. Now it is Bali. Six weeks ago, Miguel Covarrubias' handsome travel book, Island of Bali (TIME, Nov. 22), did Bali up brown; last week Vicki Baum's latest novel added a few trimmings.

But Vicki Baum insists that she has jumped on no Bali band wagon. As long ago as 1916, her foreword says, photographs of the island so fascinated her that they became her favorite smelling salts against "war, revolution, inflation. , . . ." Nineteen years later a sight of the real thing outdid her dreams. And then an old Dutch colonizer died and left her a trunkful of manuscripts, among them an "interminable" novel built around the final conquest of Bali by the Dutch in 1904-06. Her long novel is "a free paraphrase" of this lengthy legacy.

Tale of Bali escapes the lush romanticism of most South Sea island romances, will remind most readers of The Good Earth. Its central character is a good-natured, lusty young peasant named Pak, who is superstitious about religious matters but a resourceful realist about women, cockfights and politics.

Trouble begins for the peace-loving, artistic natives when their hereditary prince refuses to pay the Dutch an exorbitant indemnity for a shipwrecked vessel which his people have stripped. After two years of provocative threats the Dutch land an army. In his last stand the prince deliberately leads 2,000 men, women and children in a mass suicide against the Dutch guns. The men, armed only with swords, go down like tenpins. The women kill their children, then themselves. This invincible heroism, says Author Baum, taught the Dutch to rule the conquered Balinese with a loose rein. One thing the prudish Dutchmen did insist on: that the satiny brown-skinned Balinese women cover their beautiful breasts.*

Because the prince had appropriated his champion fighting cock and put out his brother's eyes for having an affair with a harem woman, Peasant Pak lies low during the fighting, wastes no time mourning his jasmine-scented leader. Realist Pak's patriotism is concentrated on his rice fields and chickens, his exciting second wife and his own neck.

*A custom more honored in the breach than the observance.

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