The YEAR'S BEST

THE ROOTS OF HEAVEN, by Remain Gary. The hero of this startling and moving novel crusades to save the elephants of Equatorial Africa from extinction; for to him they seem the last living symbols of freedom in a world determined to enslave itself. Not many writers could have conceived this jarring parable of liberty, and fewer still could have brought it off with French Novelist Gary's brilliance.

HOME FROM THE HILL, by William Humphrey. A carefully written story of a young man who bitterly discovers the dead rot at the heart of his parents' lives. The book offers a tense evocation of small-town Texas life and a sense of personal tragedy that borders on myth. Faulkner without the undergrowth.

A GLASS ROSE, by Richard Bankowsky. In a year of good first novels, this one tried for much and achieved most of it. A grim, sadly true story of family disintegration in which a Polish immigrant father is brought to despair and hands on a shameful legacy to his daughter.

THE TEN THOUSAND THINGS, by Maria Dermout. Dutch Author Dermout was 67 when she wrote her first novel. Locale: a strange world she intimately knew--the islands of Indonesia. Curious, bathed in memory and completely original, the book merges white and native existence in beautiful language, washes against the senses like an insistent tropical swell.

A PLACE WITHOUT TWILIGHT, by Peter S. Feibleman. Another first novel and one that makes a daring foray into uncertain ground. White Author Feibleman deals with a New Orleans Negro family that is more oppressed by black ignorance than by white prejudice. His success is startling, though not total.

THE STARS GROW PALE, by Karl Bjarnhof. Written by a Danish author and musician, who is himself blind, Bjarnhof's fictional memoir of a boy gradually losing his sight is steadily touching, not once sentimental. In it, blindness leads to selfdiscovery, and when music fills the boy's dark world, it is as if he had won a major victory.

THE MAGIC BARREL, by Bernard Malamud. A fine collection of short stories of which only two or three fail to click. They are strung on the theme that the good one man does to another forever enslaves the donor to the fate of the receiver. Most of the characters are Jewish, some of the developments are fantastic, and even the most commonplace of Malamud's yarns has an air of accidental fantasy.

TWO WOMEN, by Alberto Moravia. For once, Italy's best writer seems to say that sex is not the most urgent business of mankind. His heroines (or victims) are a widowed mother and her daughter trying to find a quiet place to sit out the war. They are ill-used in turn by fellow countrymen so rude and crude that only a fellow Italian would dare describe them. Finally they return to Rome with wounds deeper than those they thought to escape.

THE KING MUST DIE, by Mary Renault. No great novelist but an eminently able literary archaeologist, Author Renault dug up the year's best piece of historical fiction. Her telling of the bloody Theseus story and her meticulously detailed view of ancient Mediterranean life is a notable achievement.

BALTHAZAR, by Lawrence Durrell. The second volume of a projected tetralogy extends the large hint given by last year's Justine: that Anglo-Irish Author Durrell writes just about the most original prose fiction to be found today. Balthazar revisits the scene--Alexandria--and the characters of Justine, catches them again in a blaze of passion, decadence and self-doubt that adds a new dimension of truth to the many faces of love.

LOLITA, by Vladimir Nabokov. The year's most controversial novel and also, by all odds, the best written. Simply as the story of a perverted sexual adventure, it is shocking. As an exploration of the secret places of the heart, mind and spirit, ruled by terrible private devils, it moves beyond shock into compassion.

THE ONCE AND FUTURE KING, by T. H. White. In a giant labor of patriotic love, British Author White gives old King Arthur a likelier dressing-up than all the mythmakers of the past.

DOCTOR ZHIVAGO, by Boris Pasternak. The man who won the 1958 Nobel Prize for literature was not allowed to accept it, but he produced the most remarkable novel to come out of Russia since the Revolution--a sprawling, lyrical, religious reaffirmation of man's right to be free and to be himself.

THE LAW, by Roger Vailland. In the Italian town of Porto Manacore, the main sports seem to be sex and formalized verbal abuse. Author Vailland won France's Prix Goncourt with this slick, cynical and true-ringing novel of small-town hunger--for women, for power, for land and money.

THE SECRET, by Alba de Cespedes. Mamma, with grown children and a husband who takes her for granted, is an Italian; but she stands for the mammas of all countries who belatedly think that devotion to home and family have robbed them of more exciting ways to live. Author de Cespedes is a better guide to the female heart and mind than most of the psychologists in the bookstalls.

CHILD OF OUR TIME, by Michel del Castillo. A harrowing, terribly unsophisticated testimony to man's capacity for inhumanity, and a minor masterpiece of its kind. Written as a novel, it reads more like the bitter, autobiographical odyssey of the boy who, at three, saw corpses on the streets of Madrid, experienced the concentration camp's life-in-death during the '30s and '40s, survived the indifference of his own parents, and could still perceive the good in life.

BREAKFAST AT TIFFANY'S, by Truman Capote. A long story and three short ones about the waifs and strays of the world who search for handholds and usually get their fingers stepped on. Holly Golightly, a good little bad girl, is the disarming and memorable heroine of the title story. Caparisoned in Capote's crisp, shining prose, she and her raffish companions seem like characters from a tawdry but real bedtime story.

FROM THE TERRACE, by John O'Hara. The biggest (897 pages), most ambitious novel of a writer who takes himself more seriously than it is possible to take his most recent books. A potentially nice rich kid from O'Hara's Pennsylvania runs short on character, presumably because of the sins of the father and the social disarrangements of his own time. The O'Hara ear for speech has the relentless giveaway of a tape recorder--but it reels on too long. Head and shoulders above the year's run of the mill, but still a semifailure.

NONFICTION

NAKED TO MINE ENEMIES, by Charles W. Ferguson. Probably the best biography yet written about Cardinal Wolsey, the butcher's son who became England's most powerful statesman. A great churchman and a genius of state administration, he fell victim to his own appetite for power, Henry VIII's displeasure and the Reformation itself. Author Ferguson sees him plain, with charity and good sense.

INSIDE RUSSIA TODAY, by John Gunther. Reporter Gunther got inside Russia for a while, bludgeoned his way through stacks of other people's books about Russia and produced the best of his Inside testimonies. Surface-smooth, unclogged by deep thought, it gives the U.S. reader the best, most colorful and most painless report available of Khrushchev-land.

PART OF A LONG STORY, by Agnes Boulton. Eugene O'Neill's second wife describes just a year and a half of her life with genius, but she makes it memorable. Great drunken sprees were wedged between great plays, and melodrama was always just around the living-room door.

SEAMARKS, by St.-John Perse. A once great diplomat, and for years one of the world's top poets, at his best in a huge, majestic but obscure celebration of the sea and its meanings in the life of man.

MARLBOROUGH'S DUCHESS, by Louis Kronenberger. A topnotch biography, continuously rich with the shine of a fabulous period, provides a full-dress portrait of an 18th century woman whom no one could underestimate until she overrated herself.

IN FLANDERS FIELDS, by Leon Wolff. Incredible bravery and even more incredible high-command folly make up the grisly story of one of the saddest campaigns of World War I. Author Wolff's account of tragedy amid blood and mud is cool, informed and horrifyingly persuasive.

THE COMPLETE LETTERS OF VINCENT VAN GOGH, translated by C. de Dood. From 1872 to 1890, when the last letter was found on his suicide's body, Van Gogh set down a harrowing record of frustrations, assorted guilts and illnesses of the mind and body. The letters find a beautiful monument in this magnificent example of bookmaking.

95 POEMS, by e. e. cummings. The perennial Pan of U.S. poetry, still mildly addicted to typographical high jinks, proves in his latest sheaf of poems that he is as fresh, vivid and strangely lyrical as ever.

MISTRESS TO AN AGE, by J. Christopher Herold. Germaine de Stael back again in a first-rate biography of the woman who rode the French Revolution like a balky horse, managed, without beauty or other feminine graces, to capture as lovers many of the foremost men of her day. Napoleon said no, and that may have been his major mistake.

THE MEMOIRS OF FIELD-MARSHAL MONTGOMERY. Since Monty knows that he was always right and his critics always wrong, he can be irritating. But his recollections of World War II are important, candid and touched with unexpected humor.

LEYTE, by Samuel Eliot Morison. World War II's great naval battle, and one of the most important in the world's history, brought into focus as the twelfth volume of 14 that will rank among the most important of all naval writings.

HENRY ADAMS: THE MIDDLE YEARS, by Ernest Samuels. Henry Adams is immensely readable; his biographers and commentators almost never are. The second volume (one more to come) of an exceptional biography covers the 13 Adams years that show the touchy New England genius during his happiest and most human period.

THE ODYSSEY: A MODERN SEQUEL, by Nikos Kazantzakis, translated by Kimon Friar. Easily the poetry event of the year. Boldly picking up where Homer left off, Greek Author Kazantzakis (who died last year) takes Odysseus through ordeal by battle into the greater ordeal of the spirit and a search for God.

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