opinion, of course) a sound, acceptable moral viewpoint.

Judged by these standards, I consider that NO LANGUAGE BUT A CRY is well worth reading and thinking about. It deals with the struggles of an inexperienced homosexual who, trying to escape from the effects of a prison sentence, accepts a job with a firm of timber merchants in the Far East. With telling realism and economy of phrase it describes his attempts to graple with his problem and to untangle the complications of his relationships, with a beautiful girl for whom he can feel only fondness and with his boss, a masterful character who dominates him and the book.

The background-the tense business competition, the shallow snobbery of the social club-is at once interesting in itself and an admirable foil to the main story. This book is quite a change and I recommend it, despite the far from cheerful ending. B. E. J. G.

LE VIEILLARD ET L'ENFANT by Abdallah Chaamba. Les Editions de Minuit. 270 pp. Fr. 250.

Here is a book that could be written only in French and can never be translated into English.

It is a book that could be written only in French, because only the French language lends itself to the magic transformation of the dullest prose to exciting poetry. Not that Le Vieillard et l'Enfant could be subject matter of dull prose. Far from it. As a matter of fact it is exactly this quality of its extreme frankness in calling a spade a spade, which renders it untranslatable in the English language if it is to be published in any English-speaking country.

Le Vieillard et l'Enfant is the account of a three year long sexual slavery of a young boy written by the boy himself. The boy, presumably the author of the book, because the book is written in the form of autobiography, had kept random notes of his experience, and it was sheer luck that sent André Gide across his path. For André Gide immediately recognized the tremendous human value of those notes and sent them to Paris where, eventually collected and revised, they were published about two years ago.

Recently the author, Abdallah Chaamba, who in the meanwhile had emigrated from Algeria to Paris, evolving from a precocious boy prostitute to a literary minded young man, has had a second book published, which, the Paris review Juventus claims to be a much better book than his first. But, returning to Le Vieillard et l'Enfant, it seems to this reviewer to be grossly unfair to compare it with any other literary work, because it was never meant to be an exercise in literature.

Le Vieillard et l'Enfant is a confession made by a budding human soul to the One who created him and yet has forsaken him.

Le Vieillard et l'Enfant is the cry in the night of a human creature abused beyond all limits of physical and spiritual endurance.

Le Vieillard et l'Enfant is also a threnody of immense despair, a threnody made of the all-pervading loneliness excruciating to the soul, and the all-devouring hunger racking the body.

Le Vieillard et l'Enfant is finally a document of man's inhumanity to man, when the one who suffers so much is a thirteen year old boy, not yet ripe for love, but fed and

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