BOOKS

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

FARD

DOWN THERE ON A VISIT by Christopher Isherwood, Simon & Schuster, $4.75.

The delightful Isherwood gets away with murder (which is about the only vice his characters don't commit). Reviewers take Coward, Beaton, Williams, Capote, Vidal, et al, over the hot coals, hinting darkly about The Lavender (or Yellow) Set. Isherwood's people are twice as outrageously gay, but you have to hunt for a snide review of his works. Is it because he writes about sex so unsexily, in his peculiarly intellectual yet just go on with your knitting dearie while I chat about these people I know style? Or is it his amazing honesty that disarms them?

-

This latest of his is listed as fiction and a novel. But it is four reminiscences by a character named "Christopher Isherwood." The first episode is "Mr. Lancaster," set in Berlin when Isherwood is 23. The next is at age 28 and called "Ambrose," who is a wonderfully flaming rich queen who buys an island off Greece (and who talks of "when we get into power" how the hetero's will be tolerated if they do it "in decent privacy"). The next episode regards a German boy, "Waldemar," when Isherwood is 32. The last is at age 36 and is laid-and I do mean laid-mostly in Beverly Hills. It is of "Paul." the world's most

one

expensive (Isherwood gives him $10,000) male whore, who ends up the book in Paris in 1953 as a hashish addict.

When Isherwood doesn't attempt the broader novel and confines himself to the reminiscent style as in this work and the earlier Berlin Stories. he achieves total believableness. You can't pay a bigger compliment to fiction than to say you never for a minute thought it was.

K. O. Neal

THE GARDEN by Kathrin Perutz, New York, Atheneum, 1962, 185 Pp., $3.95.

This first book by Miss Perutz is not what could strictly be called a "gay" novel; however, it deals with the allimportant phase of homosexuality which many young girls experience as they seek their way toward womanhood and the meaning of love.

Kathrin Perutz was born in New York City in 1939. She received her B.A. Degree from Barnard College in 1960 and has traveled in South America and most of the European countries and Russia. A picture of her by Liesl Steiner appears on the back of the very attractive dust jacket.

The Garden is an impressive book to come from the pen of so young an author. It is a sensitive and delightful account of a love affair of two young

24