Doleful

THREE LOVES--Max Brod--Knopf ($2.50).

"'And I have always considered you so cold--'I cautiously began.

"Her voice, usually veiled, was as shrill as a doorbell and as ugly as a poor sermon: 'How else can I be when I feel that I am nothing to a man but a means of enjoyment--not a human being, only a pillow?'"

For that reason they parted. She went to the nothingness of forgotten characters, while Mayreder went on to his second and third loves. His second love was a virgin who consoled him and was about to introduce him to her father when Stasha, the third love, recently escaped from an insane asylum, snatched him up. The story ends when Mayreder, refusing to murder Dr. Karkos after Stasha specially requests him to do so, finds Stasha herself murdered by the doctor.

Author Brod, responsible for a good chronicle of European Jews entitled Reubeni, is extremely doleful in this, his latest novel.