Sadistic Sailors

HORNS FOR OUR ADORXMEXT--Aksel Sandemose--Knopf ($2.50).

An ex-sailor and lumberjack. Aksel Sandemose is a 39-year-old Danish novelist who has been acclaimed and anathematized in much the same terms as James Joyce, Celine, Rainer Maria Rilke, Franz Kafka. Like them, he follows a realism that is epic and allegorical rather than photographic. Two years ago Sandemose was introduced to U. S. readers with a powerful, puzzling story called A Fugitive Crosses His Tracks. Acknowledging Sandemose's originality, critics called him less original than Joyce, less obscure than Kafka and Rilke, less cynical than Celine.

Tender-skinned readers nevertheless found his novel as painful an experience as having themselves tattooed.

Puzzling part of Sandemose's new story is found in the allegorical fables and ironical essays (on alcohol, religion, sex, families, venereal disease) which serve as prologue and epilogue to each chapter.

The main narrative is much simpler--the story of six seamen aboard a tramp schooner bound from Norway to Newfoundland, with a couple of months ashore in Iceland, where the captain is laid up with pneumonia.

Central character of the book is a mournful defrocked priest, who, as a result of his many beatings, humiliations, neuroses, pathetic romanticizing, venereal disease and terror, gradually reaches a mental state indistinguishable from his delirium tremens when drunk. The crew use him as a butt, let up on him slightly when he is half dead. Once they find a substitute outlet in a fantastic rat-hunt--the high point of Sandemose's grotesque humor.

The rest of the time, their substitute is alcohol. ("What is said about alcohol." begins a prologue, "comes mostly from people who stand in a Platonic relationship to narcotics.") As they pour out their bawdy yarns, their pasts of incest, arson, rape, miscellaneous sadism, the reader grudgingly admits a growing sympathy for the preacher. No scape goat ever had such a gang so unremittingly against him.

Despite its brutal theme, Horns For Our Adornment shows an underlying sympathy for its characters which, by comparison with the unadulterated nihilism of Celine (TIME, Aug. 29), makes Sandemose seem buoyant with human feeling. This quality to some readers may be as shocking as the author's merciless realism.

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