Short Notices

THE WATERFALLS OF SLUNJ by Heimito von Doderer. 375 pages. Harcourt, Brace & World. $6.95.

Even the name Vienna sets up resonances that belong to the past: candlelight, slow waltz music, fiacres, lindentree parks, the Danube and the Prater --a capital jewel in the crown of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, doomed to obliteration by transitional winds. The old Vienna has its surviving spirits, none sturdier than Heimito von Doderer, at 70 Austria's foremost novelist. A courtly and playful Viennese, Von Doderer remembers with fondness the city as it was half a century ago. The Waterfalls of Slunj is his love song to that twilight time, the first of an intended four-volume epic. The author is neither moralizing nor sentimental, and his book approaches no more than an old man's reminiscent glow. This is how Vienna was. These are the people who coursed its cobbled streets under the gaslights--denizens of a far less frenetic age. Von Doderer has no illusions: he knows they are all dead, along with their time, but the fact cannot sadden a memory whose gaiety is as imperishable as the ghost of Vienna itself. In his skillful hands, the ghost becomes very much alive.

PURSUIT by Berry Morgan. 241 pages. Houghton MifFlin. $4.95.

Houghton Mifflin awarded its fellowship of $5,000 for this first novel, and has trumpeted it as a major publishing event ranking with Carson McCullers' The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter. The publishers must be funnin'. Unwittingly, Berry Morgan, a 47-year-old Mississippi housewife, has produced the dadgum laughingest parody of magnolia-and-plantation fiction to come out of the South since Marse Robert surrendered at Appomattox. Her passel of lil ole psychopathic dimwits seems to have been spawned in a high-rent district of Tobacco Road. When Pappy Ingles, the hard-drinkin', ruttin' hero, tries to kill hisself by knocking his punkin haid against the marble top off'n a dresser, the humor turns as purplish black as a ripe fox grape. Trouble is, the author is danged serious.

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