Bookends

THE MAKING OF THE AFRICAN QUEEN

by Katharine Hepburn

Knopf; 131 pages; $15.95

Katharine Hepburn writes like this -- with lots of dashes. Fragmented sentences too. Exclamations! Asides. Reading her is like listening to her -- one imagines. She suggests -- in a meandering subtitle -- that she almost lost her mind while shooting on location in 1951 in what was then the Belgian Congo. But of course she did not. Found a good, perhaps unsuspected, part of it, actually. As she says, among all her movies and plays, The African Queen is the one that remains vividly in memory. For good reason. Tough shoot -- they don't come any tougher. Heat. Bugs. Snakes. Minimum crew, equipment. Maximum heightening of the senses deep in exotic country. Sensitive descriptions of people, landscape. Plus. Bogart a total pro -- on time, lines letter-perfect, hating his hairpiece. John Huston an elusive macho sprite -- flitting through the jungle dropping big game, occasional shrewd directorial insights (gave Hepburn Eleanor Roosevelt as role model).

Our heroine? Practical. Idealistic. Self-deprecating. Humorous anecdotes about both her intestinal troubles and her intestinal fortitude inconveniencing everyone. One thinks -- as long as Kate Hepburn lives, so does the spirit of 19th century New England. Odd -- nice -- it took unlikely root in show biz. Physically her book is like her -- slender, handsome (many good pictures), irresistible. "Glory be," as she says.

BLUEBEARD

by Kurt Vonnegut

Delacorte; 298 pages; $17.95

Those who feel that writing should be a matter of opening a vein and bleeding have never entirely approved of Kurt Vonnegut, whose murmurous style seems as easily achieved as respiration. If the man simply breathes his stuff out, can he be producing anything substantial? He can, of course. Vonnegut's rueful, wondering satire in Slaughterhouse Five, Player Piano and half a dozen other books says "Goodbye, better luck next time" to human society in the late 20th century. That said, however, an admirer must admit that Vonnegut's novelizing occasionally ticks on reflexively when there seems to be nothing in particular on his mind. So with Bluebeard, whose hero is a wealthy, one-eyed old man named Rabo Karabekian, a magazine illustrator in his youth, then a soldier during World War II, then, briefly, an acclaimed abstract expressionist painter. There is a random quality to this history: Why one- eyed? Why a painter and not a cellist? Rabo's recollections are wistful and charming, but vaporous. The graceful pages are a gifted author's daydreams, but they never coalesce into a novel.

SAVAGES

by Shirley Conran

Simon & Schuster; 587 pages; $19.95

How do you track a naked ex-gigolo in a rain forest? Exactly how are the banana leaves placed on a human body to prepare it for roasting? Can you convert a brassiere into a slingshot? What is the proper technique for slitting someone's throat with a kitchen knife? The answers to these and other crucial questions about staying alive in the "dark, rotting maw" of a tropical jungle are elucidated by British Writer Shirley Conran. She follows her 1982 best seller, Lace, with a tale of five rich, pampered corporate wives running for their lives on the cannibal-infested island of Paui, having seen their powerful husbands cut down by terrorists at the Paradise Bay Hotel. How the designer-dressed ladies survive four months of the cyclone season (known as the "Long Wet") and unite into a group of trained commandos and savage killers is Conran's story. For women who have always wanted to live on the terrain of boys' adventures, her jungle may be a dreamer's paradise.

OUT ON THE RIM

by Ross Thomas

Mysterious Press; 314 pages; $17.95

This cynically funny, violent caper, set in Corazon Aquino's Philippines, features a motley band of American adventurers: a grizzled expert on terrorism; a gorgeous female Secret Service agent; a beguiling con man of Chinese descent and his lethal Anglo sidekick; and a crook-of-all-work nicknamed Otherguy (he always says some other guy did it). They are hired by an unknown employer -- maybe the U.S., maybe a multinational corporation, maybe Aquino herself -- to buy the retirement of a longtime guerrilla leader. Immediately they start plotting to swipe the $5 million payoff for themselves. The theme of dishonor among thieves is echoed in oily CIA agents, as well as in the rebels, who rightly mistrust their own families. Ross Thomas keeps the characters aloft in a cloud of confusion until the last moments, when, a touch too soon, they subside to an earthbound, workmanlike finale. He ends with a hint of a welcome sequel: there is plenty of joyous connivance left in this crew.