Lament for the Century

THE DISINHERITED (274 pp.)--Michel del Castillo--Knopf ($3.95).

This is another lament for the 20th century by the Spaniard who wrote Child of Our Time (TIME, Oct. 20, 1958). In that moving autobiographical novel, Author del Castillo charted a sad trail from the corpse-strewn streets of Madrid to the concentration camps of France and Germany, to something like inner peace at a Jesuit school back in Spain. Still only 26, and now living in Paris, he tries in The Disinherited to revisit the Spanish revolution, which flamed around him when he was a child. At this distance, memory is small help, and the tales of heroes and sufferers take on the shadowy cast of legend. Set against the tough honesty of George Orwell's Homage to Catalonia, or Jose Maria Gironella's The Cypresses Believe in God, this novel has the air of a routine reconstruction. Yet it deserves to be read as a reminder of old passions and issues that are far from dead.

Substantially, Del Castillo tells the truth about the desperate Spain of his early childhood. He also makes the necessary point that the bitterness of starving Spaniards--as well as the idealism of their political champions--was brutally exploited by the Communist Party. But for all his abundance of feeling, Del Castillo lacks the equipment of the novelist, and for all his bitter experiences, he still lacks certain political insights. In an agitated foreword Del Castillo writes: "I have never belonged to the Party and am thus not a renegade. But neither am I anti-Communist ... I can easily conceive that a person might, after having read my book, join the Communist Party in all good faith." This possibility is so unlikely that the author seems to have misunderstood his own book.

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