MARION ALIVE

Assured popularity on the author's name, and past books, this story, in the true-confession ""I"" style, of Marion's life and loves, her personal problems, family, friends, from Vienna of before-the-last-war, to Europe of the present war. More concerned with intimate than world affairs, Marion, on the verge of admitting to an Englishman fifteen years her junior, and the small, homely details of her past life are revealed in a series of lengthy flashbacks -- her Viennese upbringing, her fascination for knowledge that is taboo, her violin career ruined by a broken wrist, work for a socialist and his death in 1914. Germany during that war, her marriage and birth of her babies, death of her husband, security in the popularity of her wood carvings, marriage with an American and life is his country. Then back to Germany where her younger son, under the impression naziism is the perfect thing, runs afoul of the machinery and they learn he has tuberculosis of the eyes. The onslaught of the present war, efforts to help Viennese friends escape, and the decision to stay on to complete the boy's cure...That is Marion's life, replete with incident, people, emotion, and intimate revelation. Good for rentals and the not ultraconservative woman reader.