Current & Various

THE REAWAKENING by Primo Levi. 222 pages. Atlantic-Little, Brown. $4.75.

A horse-drawn Russian army cart creaked to a halt before the cement cellblock at Auschwitz. Gathering their tattered bundles, a dozen silent men crawled into the wagon, huddled together against the cold, and jolted through the gate into the snowy darkness. Among them was Primo Levi, a young Italian Jew who had been interned for two years at Auschwitz and the nearby slave-labor camp of Buna-Monowitz. In an earlier book, If This Is a Man, Chemist-Sociologist Levi recalled his imprisonment in chilling detail. In this reflective sequel, he tells of his arduous return to life. With jovial inefficiency, the Russians shunted him from camp to camp, finally sent him off on a ramshackle freight train that wandered erratically for 33 days across six countries before setting him down at last in sunny Italy. The journey had its bits of humor: Captain Egorov, commander of a repatriation camp, met the news of an imminent general inspection by swathing the Augean public latrine in an impenetrable tangle of barbed wire. The journey also had its vestiges of horror: Daniele, a sole survivor of a Nazi raid on the Venice ghetto, put bread on the ground before starving German prisoners of war and forced them to crawl on all fours to get it. Slowly, by fits and starts, Levi reawakened to reality. From a peremptory Greek companion, he learned basic survival tactics: "He who has shoes can search for food." Then one day Levi asked directions from a Polish priest, got an answer in Latin, felt a sudden, inexplicable sense of restoration to humanity and health. His memoir is dignified and affecting, a gentle epic of recuperation.

TWO PEOPLE by Donald Windham. 252 pages. Coward-McCann. $4.95.

Black-haired Marcello was an amiable Roman ragazzo: Forrest was a young American businessman who had recently separated from his wife, stayed on in Rome to forget. The story of their homosexual relationship forms the basis--but only the basis--for this perceptive, unsensational novel. For Marcello, son of a domineering manufacturer, the affair begins casually as one among many he has already enjoyed. He is unemotionally pleased by the physical pleasure and equally delighted to pick up some extra cash to spend on his girl. But for Forrest the affair is unique: what begins as a distraction becomes an obsession--both with Marcello and with Rome. At last, realizing that he will always remain essentially an alien both to Marcello and to Rome, he breaks off the affair and returns to his wife in America. Though all this sounds like a conventional refurbishing of that shopworn literary theme, homosexuality, it is considerably more. Forrest and Marcello are really people in whose alien yet partially convergent experiences Author Windham explores two characteristic encounters with the Eternal City.

AN INTRODUCTION TO ASIA fay Jean Herbert. 410 pages. Oxford. $7.50.

Asia is the elephant of continents, and Western visitors are like the blind men of the legend: each finds a different Asia and thinks it is the only one. Recent visitors, of course, have experienced an elephant on the rampage; their reports are exciting but often lack depth. To restore perspective is the purpose of this treatise by Dr. Jean Herbert, a professor of Oriental studies at the University of Geneva. The author's learning is formidable and his style a pleasure, but even after 40 years of study, he cannot quite manage to see the elephant whole. The book is a brilliant essay on the traditions and temperament of Asian man, but Dr. Herbert has almost nothing to say about what has happened to those traditions and that temperament in the last 20 years. However, the reader who has foreground but lacks background will be grateful for this vigorous and informative encapsulation of a continent.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.