Newsday from New York, New York • 123

Jl. I Ml I 1 1 HM H1M I mi The Prodigal Daughter A MATS PUCE, by Annie Emaux. Translated by Tanya Leslie. Four Wals Eight Windows, 99 $15.95. By Christine Schwartz put it simply, you could say that Annie Emaux I I serializes her life and that shes very good at it, I I but that wouldnt do justice to her talent as writ- I I er-cum-soriopsycholofpst, nor would it give any measure of her success in France, where shes become a best-selling author.

Emaux writes taut autobiographical novels in which her experiences in the small Normandy town ofY vetot resonate with a clarity and depth that are all but addictive. After Cleaned Out," which dealt with her fictional alter egos back-alley abortion, Emaux wrote A Womans Story (recently released in paper by Bal lan tine), in which she recounted her mothers life, degradation from Alzheimers disease and death, and explored their mother-daughter relationship. With A Mans Place (published in France prior to A Womans Story) Emaux completes her parental dyptich: Sometime after his death, she recalls her fathers life and examines the way that her estrangement from him paralleled her alienation from her class. With customary sobriety, Emaux reconstructs the story of a life governed by necessity, collating her fathers words, tastes and mannerisms, as well as the main events of his life. The son of an illiterate carter and of a cottage weaver, Ernaux father worked as a farmhand until World War I allowed him to see more of France and take a job in a rope factory.

Soon after marrying, he achieved the humble but in his eyes enviable, position of owning a cafe and grocery store, occasionally getting menial jobs to make ends meet As she traces her fathers economic and social progress, Emaux stresses the persistence of his peasant ways: drinking soup in the morning, sleeping in his shirt and vest, eating with a daspknife that he deans on his overalls and using patois to talk to his wife and daughter. Those habits, together with the awareness that his grasp of the world remains limited, lead him to a deep feeling of inferiority: He realized we were inferior and refused to accept this, while at the same time doing everything he could to conceal the feet. We spent a whole evening wondering what on earth the headmistress had meant when she had said: To play the part, your little girl will be dressed in town clothes As central to A Mans Place as her fathers hardships and frustrations are Emaux own feelingB of inadequacy, as die adopts the middle-class values and tastes of Catholic school and college and stops communicating with him: I imagined that I had nothing else to learn from him," she explains. His words and ideas wouldnt be heard in French and philosophy lecture halls, or in the other girls drawing rooms, where one sat on crimson plush sofas. The trophy of Emaux ascension a political-science mqjor who becomes her husband seldom joins her on her rare visits home because what could a man brought up in middle-class circles where people got degrees and cultivated the art of irony possibly have to say to honest, hard-working people like my parents? At this point, her alienation readies a climax, but it crumbles when her father dies.

Rebuilding her fathers life, block by block, Emaux begins to accept the origins that she has tried to deny for so many years, and thus abolishes the humiliation of having felt both socially pressured to uproot herself and ashamed, much later, of having done so. As the narration develops, the authors painful, gradual recognition of her roots be- comes a form of Catholic penance, as self-mortification 5 leads to purification. At the very end of her tale, Emaux can declare, Now I have finished taking possession of the legacy with which I had to part when I entered the educated, bourgeois world," for she is now at peace with her father, her class and hereelf. Sharp and spare, Emaux prose perfectly fits the bare facts and emotions of her life. This may explain why shes become such a popular writer in France, whose literary tradition favors elaborate sentences and coded expressions of fedings.

Though shes unlikely to achieve similar status in this country, Emaux simplicity of form and poignant truthfulness deserve careful attention. Christine Schwdrizwntei frequenlly on Vrenchadtun. SUNDAY. MAY 24, 1962 FmFM As men are murdered, de Souza, feigning impartiality, sets up the mechanisms for a court inquiry into the assassi-nation. Meanwhile, de Matos and Vieira counterplot to change the course of the judicial proceedings and to rid Bahia of its ruthless governor.

Because Bay of All Saints is her first novel, Miranda hasnt learned how to disclose information. She doesnt give the background to the Teles-Ravasco feud brothels, shacks and churches. To Miranda, Bahia is a place for pleasure and sin," but it is the sin she stresses. She juxtaposes Brazils rich, fertile natural beauty with the squalid corruption of its people. Boca do Inferno (Mouth of Hell), the books original Portuguese title, reflects this: Its not only Gregorio de Matos nickname, but also a metaphor for Bahia, especially its decline.

The world was different, men of stature had disappeared. And the Archbishop now found himself being drawn into quarrels as petty as they were 'meaningless This was the hell of men. Mans shortsighted greed has destroyed the promise of the New World. This is a timely message as we celebrate the quincentenary of Columbus landing. ipd9xRodgersiS'tnJ'os8uianteditor mt-The New York Review of Books.

until almost a hundred pages after the assassination. Characters frequently repeat details about an event that the author already has described. But if Mirandas skills as a novelist are undeveloped, her grasp of Brazilian history is sure. Seventeenth -Century Bahia with its filthy, narrow it jostling its fetid waterfront Gregpopdp Matos and the others hide in the citys maze of.