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RIA by Felix C. Forrest

RIA

By

Publisher: Duell, Sloan & Pearce

An oblique, fragmentary return to the past as Ria Regardie Brown, now a widow of this war and a victim of a neurotic crippling of her arm, retraces reluctantly a childhood in Germany, an experience there too painful for deliberate recall. Through her memories of others, and theirs of her, a summer spent at Bad Christi is brushed in, the strange household of the once noble Brautigams, and in particular Carlo Brautigam, believed mad by many but specially protected by Ria- then fifteen. Gradually the focus of reflections is tightened to the experience of an afternoon when Carlo, unbalanced by his rejection by another girl, is failed by Ria as she returns too late to find him seeking an outlet in the slaughter of his cat...A strange story, not without symbolical allusion and heightened by the indirect device of narration, this is quite limited in appeal.