THE SARDINIAN SMILE

A short novel, seemingly half of which is given over to description, dilated in a prose which is fauve, fleshy, immoderate. Through letters, and through the eyes of a not too disinterested friend, this looks back on the crime passionel which takes place under the blazing Mediterranean sun and within the menage of one Carl-Gustav Enquist. Carl-Gustav who knows that his seductive wife Freya is not the slow tease (""allumeuse"") which she seems to be, is slowly unmanned by his ungratified desire for her. But it is their son whom he falsely suspects of finally putting the horns on the bull in a variant of the original myth . . . . . Volupte cum violence which no doubt may have come across more successfully in the original French.