The YEAR'S BEST

LADY L., by Remain Gary. A relatively slight and urbane book, but one that the year needed. The British lady turns out to be a reformed French prostitute, and her old anarchist lover is cast as Author Gary's target: a handsome, humorless fellow so bent on saving humanity that he forgets the nature of humans and their occasional indisposition to be saved.

THE CAPTIVE AND THE FREE, by Joyce Cary.

Novelist Gary died before he could finish his book, but his imperfect work has more of life's stuff in it than all but a few of the year's other novels. His hero is a seedy, reedy British faith healer. Gary's unanswered question: Does the mystical hipster sometimes feel more truly than the Establishment square?

UNARMED IN PARADISE, by Ellen Marsh.

The best love story of the year, involving a grubby Paris background, an unstable German-American heroine and an even more unstable White Russian lover. Author Marsh spells out the simple truth that love is not always a pleasure.

ACROSS PARIS AND OTHER STORIES, by Marcel Ayme. Even in translation, these are the year's best short stories. French Author Ayme tells about seemingly ridiculous or fantastic situations in which ordinary Frenchmen find themselves lost. Wit and clean writing save him--if not his characters--at every turn.

SPINSTER, by Sylvia Ashton-Warner. A flashing original both in style and subject by a New Zealand schoolmistress who writes about her calling with a beautiful sense of mission.

THE PLEDGE, by Friedrich Duerrenmatt.

From the routine makings of a conventional mystery story, Swiss Author Duerrenmatt produces a well-written and suspenseful story whose sad ironies raise it well above even the best whodunit level.

MOUNTOLIVE by Lawrence Durrell. This third book of a brilliantly conceived tetralogy is the least so far published, but it still makes most contemporary fictioners seem like placid carpenters. Against its motley Egyptian background, a raffish, colorful lot of native and international characters plot, sin and love with an intensity that edges every page with fever.

THE MIDDLE AGE OF MRS. ELIOT, by Angus Wilson. The freshly widowed heroine tries to find a career and a woman's card of identity; all she seems to turn up is welfare-state boredom and ineffectually Angry Young Men, many of whom are not men at all. Author Wilson, his fine style dipped in malice, deftly destroys whole chunks of English society.

TIME WALKED, by Vera Panovo. Russian Author Panova, writing with unostentatious excellence, has both the compassion and the mother wit to describe the world of a six-year-old--and to recall an existence that most grownups have forgotten.

THE BRIDGE ON THE DRINA, by Ivo Andric.

A span of 350 years is a lot to pack into a novel. Yugoslavian Author Andric does it in a splendidly evocative story of his home town, for centuries a meeting place of many races and a target for a variety of conquerors. There is no plot except the rhythm of war and peace, life and death.

THE REAL LIFE OF SEBASTIAN KNIGHT, by Vladimir Nabokov. Readers in search of more nymphets were disappointed by the re-issue of this 1941 novel; those looking for early evidence of the talent that produced Lolita were well rewarded. The dead Sebastian's life is reconstructed by a half brother, and the mosaic of memory evokes the hurt of exile, the reach for personal status in a trivial world, and the search for artistic perfection.

THE RACK, by A. E. Ellis. In a French tuberculosis sanatorium, patients die, old hands take the treatment with a shrug, new members of the dread guild shuttle between hope and despair, while doctors carry on with a mixture of skill and cynicism. Hero Paul Davenant's case is reported with almost unbearable clinical exactness, but somehow, English Author Ellis also makes his book seem like a kind of monument to man's will to survive.

THE DEVIL'S ADVOCATE, by Morris L. West.

Unless the novelist is Graham Greene or Franc,ois Mauriac, the theological impress on human action seldom results in readable fiction. Australian Novelist West fails to join this select company, but still gives the reader a convincing, well-written story about priests and their vocation, claims to sainthood, the nature of salvation.

THE POORHOUSE FAIR, by John Updike.

Gifted Writer Updike puts a do-gooding, rationalist prefect in charge at a home for the aged, and the oldsters rise in revolt against a well-meant but sterile effort to tidy up their lives. Even at grave's edge they want to be treated with dignity while enjoying man's right to imperfection. In controlled prose, Updike lets the debate between Adam's descendants and the man who denies Adam's Maker end in a draw.

NONFICTION

KITCHENER: PORTRAIT OF AN IMPERIALIST, by Philip Magnus. This is a fine, in some ways model biography of a fighting man and a public hero who, like many a Victorian bigwig, seems almost ludicrous today. Lord Kitchener, a cold, arrogant, contemptuous bachelor, not only believed in the white man's burden but fought courageously in colonial wars to keep tha burden on English backs.

BORSTAL BOY, by Brendan Behan. In 1939 Irish Playwright Behan, then 16, was assigned to blow up the British battleship King George V, was caught with the explosives on him and sent to an English reform school (Borstal) for three years. His account of school life bursts at the seams with robustious good humor. To judge from the book (if not from his more recent, much-publicized boozy escapades), reform school can make a man of a boy.

THE MARAUDERS, by Charlton Ogburn Jr.

Author Ogburn's war was the World War II Burma campaign; he was there as an expendable second lieutenant with "Merrill's Marauders." With fairness and common sense, he describes the actions and assesses their worth, plays fair with the enemy and brings an aura of humanity to the grim scene.

IN THE DAYS OF McKINLEY, by Margaret Leech. The best book yet written on the 25th president. As seen by Pulitzer Prizewinner (Reveille in Washington) Leech, McKinley is true to the trusts yet true to himself, a big-business candidate who was twice voted in by the man with the dinner pail.

JAMES JOYCE, by Richard Ellmann. A difficult man and difficult writer, along with his companions, family and endless personal and artistic crises, is documented with scrupulous care in the year's best literary biography.

JOHN PAUL JONES, by Samuel Eliot Morison. Harvard's Professor Emeritus Morison is not at his best when his hero (who at one time served Catherine the Great as Rear Admiral Pavel Ivanovich Jones) is ashore, but in describing the fighting at sea, Morison has no superior in the U.S.

POEMS, by Boris Pasfernak, translated by Eugene M. Kayden. No poet has ever with entire success hurdled the barrier of translation, yet it is plain in this first comprehensive Pasternak collection that the creative push is there, the unique vision that separates the poet from the poetaster.

KENNETH GRAHAME, by Peter Green. A fascinating biography of the chronically ill and neurotic secretary of the Bank of England whose weekend writing produced at least one children's classic. The Wind in the Willows.

THE LONGEST DAY, by Cornelius Ryan.

Years of research among troops and officers, both Allied and German, add up to a battle picture that is gripping in detail yet firmly held in the frame of strategy.

THE TRIAL OF DOCTOR ADAMS, by Sybilla Bedford. A retelling of the headline-famed case of England's Dr. John Bodkin Adams, acquitted of committing murder by drugs, this book shows what a fine novelist (The Legacy) can take back from a courtroom. Author Bedford raises the sensational to the dramatic. Her greatest triumph: sustaining suspense when all the time the reader knows the outcome.

THE ARMADA, by Gorreff Mattingly. What is sometimes called one of the decisive battles of the world, the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588 by Sir Francis Drake, settled almost nothing and was about as ineptly fought as any large-scale naval engagement in modern history. This account of the battle, and of the political and religious currents surrounding it, is brilliant history.

THE KING'S WAR, 1641-1647, by C. V. Wedgwood. The second volume of a top-notch history of Britain's 17th century civil war.

THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF MARK TWAIN, edited by Charles Neider. The latest edition of Sam Clemens' massive, sprawling recollections gives a fascinating picture of the writer whom T. S. Eliot characterized thus: "The adult side of him was boyish. Only the boy in him, that was Huck Finn, was adult."

THE HOUSE OF INTELLECT, by Jacques Barzun. An uneven but provocative attack on mass culture and mass education, in the name of old-fashioned discipline and logic.

ELIZABETH THE GREAT, by Elizabeth Jenkins. A string of brilliant miniatures of the Queen who said of herself: "I have the body of a weak and feeble woman, but I have the heart and stomach of a king."

COLLECTED POEMS OF JOHN BETJEMAN.

Victorian at heart, Britain's "major minor poet" sings (warmly) of homely, gaslit old England and (satirically) of homely, neonlit new England.

THE ANGER OF ACHILLES; HOMER'S ILIAD, translated by Robert Graves. The most charming English version since Alexander Pope's, treating the original as entertainment rather than as epic tragedy.

ACT ONE, by Moss Hart. Playwright (You Can't Take It with You) and Director (My Fair Lady) Hart tells of his youthful trek from The Bronx to Broadway. Few memoirs, theatrical or otherwise, can equal this autobiography's suspenseful plot, zany supporting cast and surefire humor.

MEMOIRS OF A DUTIFUL DAUGHTER, by Simone de Beauvoir. France's existentialist termagant. Jean Paul Sartre's first lady of the Left Bank cafes, is at least as candid as she is philosophically stubborn. Her memoirs of girlhood owe most of their charm to the surprising fact that her origins were Catholic, her upbringing puritan. She describes all this with considerable grace, ends with a conversion to Sartre's atheism which seems from her own testimony to be just another straitjacket, but one she can wear with arrogance.

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