BOOKS

Notices and reviews of books, articles, plays and poetry dealing with homosexuality and the sex variant. Readers are invited to send in reviews or printed matter for review.

THE TRANSGRESSOR

By Julien Green Translated by Anne Green. Pantheon Press, New York. 1957. $3.50. 222 pp.

This is a novel of sheer agony and desperation. A psychological novel that probes deeply into the hearts of two people who are taken into the home of the Vasseurs. Each of the inhabitants in the Vasseur household in France are about as weird and complex as nature could make any human and into this nest of frustration is dumped an orphan girl. Hedwige. who is tortured by her inability to meet and fall in love with a man. The man who does excite her and makes her mooney-eyed immediately, is one of the lower specimens of homsexuals, Gaston Dolange.

The other poor creature is a man, a cousin of the Vasseurs, a homosexual named Jean. His love affairs include a baker's son and probably Gaston. He manages to keep his life a secret until he is almost arrested by the police who keep watch on the Vasseur home for him. Frightened, he takes refuge in Naples.

Hedwige's passion and heart-beats rise higher and higher with her dreamimage of the illusive Gaston, yet her sorrowing spirits sink lower and lower toward the bitter end.

No doubt prize-winning author Julien Creen has written better books.

one

But this book is excellent, considering its vague ending, for readers who wish to know what sluggish things crawl through warped, human minds. Although the world considers the homosexual 'the transgressor, can't he view his own future with more uplifting hope and courage than resorting to suicide? Though everyone may be against him, where there's life, there is always hope.

-ARNELL LARSEN

MUFFS AND MORALS

Morrow, 4.00

by Pearl Binder

William Morrow and Co. has had the good taste to import a limited number of Miss Binder's history of clothing and its influence on morals. and the changes brought about by the changing mores of the times. Miss Binder has provided some amusing illustrations.

Miss Binder does not pretend to be thorough in the small space provided but she effectively touches upon the changes down the centuries, of man's slowly giving up his finery to women (are the men taking back the stronger colors, wearing the brighter feathers once again?) while she touches everything from gauntlets to girdles, cod-pieces to corsets.

MFB

26