PHANTOMS AND FUGITIVES

The author of the distinguished novels of the Spanish Civil War, The Cypresses Believe in God and One Million Dead now offers American readers a curious autobiographical experience. This is an inside view of psychic imbalance through the ""phantoms"" of the author's mind and Gironella succeeds magnificently in bringing the reader close to the shadow world of the mentally ill. He sketches a self-portrait of a man who has suffered tremendously, still not wholly cured, but confident, and these are the strange stories and reflections which he drove himself to write. The Phantoms are more developed: the Fugitives are notes ""written in melancholia"". They are both moving and revelatory.