Peons' Purgatory

FIESTA IN MANHATTAN--Charles Kaufman--Morrow ($2.50).

At 110th Street, Manhattan's sveltly starched Fifth Avenue passes the extreme northeast tip of Central Park, plunges into a new world--the teeming, Spanish-speaking slums, or barrio, of Lower Harlem. Mainly inhabited by Puerto Ricans, with a peppering of Cubans, Spaniards, Filipinos, Mexicans, it is one of the poorest, noisiest, brightest, muskiest, most musical and least written-about foreign quarters in Manhattan.

Set in this neglected locale, Fiesta In Manhattan is the first novel of a 34-year-old New Jerseyite, who discovered Lower Harlem's barrio by way of Mexico, where he spent a year as the happy alternative to going into his father's silk business.

The story of two lately arrived peon newlyweds, enticed to Manhattan by a scatterbrained female gringo travel writer, Fiesta In Manhattan centres on their bungling efforts to adapt themselves to the cramped, precarious life of the barrio, their worse bungling when Juan tries to raise passage money home by peddling marijuana. Living conditions in the barrio, the natives' desperate shifts to make a living, their political tempers, the quarter's underworld are documented by Author Kaufman from firsthand study.

Inevitable, apparently, to all such novels is the dash of Latin melodrama at the end. But the book is sharply written, sympathetic without being sentimental; and in conviction, if not in humor, it gains more than it suffers by comparison with Steinbeck's Tortilla Flat, its West Coast counterpart.

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