JOURNEY NOT TO END

The narrator, a nameless Hungarian underground fighter, is liberated from Belsen by the American army into a world he finds increasingly aping the organized inhumanity of the concentration camp. He escapes from the DP camp, a Luger in his pocket, buys a Swiss passport and turns thief to enable himself to secure passage aboard a ship on the South American run. In Campche, with a fine rented house and a complaisant native woman, he starts writing and for the first time begins to feel human, to feel pity for the world and its people. But he gets caught up in the Cuban revolution as a hired gun runner and then as a fugitive and at the novel's and does what he had never wanted to do---kill a man with his Luger. A first novel that is a sometimes compelling story, a mixture of skill and crudeness, profundity and surface-skimming, simplicity and pretentiousness, now fascinating, now dull. A promise of better things to come if the author studies, learns and applies the tools of his craft.