course of the novel. But so compelling are Divine, the queen, and her childhood self, Louis Culafroy; Darling Daintyfoot, her lover, a pimp; and Our Lady of the Flowers, a sixteen-year-old boy murderer, and so sure is Genet's talent for narration, that the reader is never lost.

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Mention has been made of the underlying motive of this novelpassion. Which has room within it for laughter, but never brutal laughter, always forgiving, remissive. To have Jean Genet's capacity for love is surely to be a saint. Mention has been made of his undeniable talent as a writer. So what is left?

Intelligence.

And this is an important factor. It must not be assumed that Our Lady of the Flowers is written only out of a man's emotions-emotions of the most exalted kind, pity, tenderness, compassion. Not only this. Intelligence infuses every sentence. Genet observes with sharpness every human gesture, word, thought, impulse. And the mind to which his keen eyes and ears transmit what they see and hear. the mind which deduces thoughts and impulses, though compassionate, is never deceived.

Our Lady of the Flowers is a book without illusions, without promises, without solutions. Not only a fine brain, but a brave one, dared this book. There is not a false note in it, not emotionally, not artistically, not intellectually.

But it cannot be described. It must be read.

-James Colton

OSCAR WILDE, THE AFTERMATH by H. Montgomery Hyde, Farrar, Straus, and Co., 1963, $4.50,

221 pp.

This book, we should like to think. will put an end to the dissection of

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Oscar Wilde's notoriety. In it the author carefully picks up where he left off in his earlier Trials of Oscar Wilde and carries the story of Wilde's life from the sentencing at Old Bailey to his release from Reading Gaol. In this aftermath Hyde shows that Wilde was artistically broken. Yet a few acquaintances felt Wilde to be unmarred, presumably because he was able to retain his wit.

The author's chapters on The Ballad of Reading Gaol and De Profundis which were Wilde's sole literary output from the time of his sentencing to his death, if not scholarly, are at least thoughtful. Unfortunately, Hyde in his attempt to include just about everything in his book tends to rely on much that is merely circumstantial. This kind of treatment is characteristic of Hyde's work. He places undue emphasis on the mechanics of the publication of The Ballad and De Profundis, and in his journalistic style, fails to catch the significance of the artist. Much of the book appears to be pieced together, in a pliant enough style, from bits and snatches of documents, letters, and published works which touch on Wilde's melancholy later years.

Rather than a picture of the close of Wilde's life and art, Montgomery Hyde has portrayed a sociological treatment of the unfortunate penal conditions at the end of the last century-some of which still exist today.

The period of Wilde's life covered by this book belongs in its former place in earlier biographies, in considerably shortened form. After all, Wilde's value unquestionably belongs to that period before his trial and imprisonment. The book's repetitious and pedantic rummaging of Oscar Wilde's prison life, unfortunate that life was, makes tiring reading. Leslie Colfax