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PARTISAN REVIEW
The Catalans
reads like a poor translation from the French. The
language is deliberately opaque, the result, perhaps, of a resolve to avoid
the merely colorful. This common grayness is intensified by Mr. O'Brian's
infuriating habit of using the wooliest abstract nouns and then, for em–
phasis, of repeating them immediately-a trick for the voice and not
for the pen. Everything, at last, seems to be said and observed through
a thick pane of plate glass. This is too bad, for
The Catalans
is, if some–
what obviously, a serious and carefully written novel.
The sense of seeing and hearing through obstacles is aggravated by
a multiplicity of themes.
The Catalans
begins by sounding like one of
those short French novels, all economy of line and eloquent simplicity
of language, which, whether written by Mme. de La Fayette or by
Colette, make the short French novel one of the glories of fiction.
And
then, like
The Sleeping Beauty,
it becomes crowded. It begins as an ac–
count of the death-of-the-heart in a middle-aged man. It ends-Mr.
O'Brian's musings on Grace and Damnation having disappeared sud–
denly-as an account of the awakening, in a dry season, of another
middle-aged man to the possibilities of love. Set as it is on the French
Mediterranean, a fftw miles from the Spanish border, it is also about
the sense of the family and family property as it exists among the pros–
perous bourgeoisie. The death-of-the-heart, the heart's awakening, prop–
erty, the family-a single novel could compass these. But
The Catalans
is very short and Mr. O'Brian bestows equal emphasis on these themes,
toys with them, and then loses interest. Little and too much. A deficiency
of feeling, or feeling sometimes obscured and sometimes dissipated in
language, and an excess of merely verbalized preoccupations. But when
the writing turns directly to describe a seacoast and a life which Mr.
O'Brian does not entirely love he manages an astringent veracity.
The Sisters M aterassi
is the most reassuringly substantial of these
novels. It is leisurely in a pleasantly old-fashioned way. (It was first
published in 1934, and it is tiresome of Doubleday to have left the
reader to assume that it is a new book.) It lingers throughout on the
details of the dailiest kind of life and out of them creates an entire
little world, all wonderfully alive, for Signor Palazzeschi knows exactly
what he is about and is sure of his power. This long-drawn-out and un–
climactic account of the fatuities of the Materassis, lingerie makers to
wealthy Florentines, and of their selfish and selfless devotion to a worth–
less object, their beautiful, captivating, and amoral nephew, is reminis–
cent of the novels of !talo Svevo. But with a difference. The buffoonery
of a Zeno, the folly of an Emilio Brentani destroy them spiritually. Signor
Palazzeschi, though he never loses sight of the spiritual and moral idiocy
