MARION ALIVE

Assured popularity on the author's name and previous books, this story in the true-confession style of Marion's life and loves, her personal problems, family, friends, over a span from Vienna of before the last war, to Europe of the present crisis. Concerned more with intimate than world affairs, Marion, on the verge of admitting her love for an Englishman fifteen years her junior, sees the small, homely details of her past life in a series of lengthy flashbacks. A Viennese upbringing, her absorption in knowledge that is taboo, her violin career wrecked by a broken wrist, her work with a socialist and his death in 1914, Germany during war years, marriage and the birth of her babies, widowhood, remarriage with an American, and life in his country. Then a return to Nazified Germany, where her younger son, duped by the camouflage, thinks all is well, until he runs afoul of the machinery. The onslaught of the present war, efforts to effect the escape of Austrian friends, a decision to remain forced by the need for rounding out a cure of the youth's tuberculosis of the eyes...Such is Marion's life, replete with incidents, people, emotion, intimate revelation. Good for rentals and for the not-too-conservative woman reader.