Hater of Hate

HEROES & BEASTS OF SPAIN--Manuel Chaves Nogales -- Doubleday, Doran ($2.50).

When the Spanish Civil War broke out, Manuel Chaves Nogales, author of Juan Belmonte, remained as editor of a Loyalist newspaper in Madrid, although he protested that he "lacked revolutionary spirit," disapproved of both proletarian and fascist dictatorships. After four months, having "accrued enough merits to deserve to be shot by either side," he fled to France, declaring he could have no dealings with murderers "even though in our times this is a luxury that few can afford."

Heroes & Beasts of Spain contains nine grim stories comparable in their nihilism and graphic power to Ambrose Bierce's tales of the U. S. Civil War. It is a harsh, unsparing book. The fascists who crowd its pages are brutal, the revolutionists fanatical, the peasants stupid, the intellectuals timidly ineffectual or suicidally brave. Writing with deceptive simplicity, sometimes introducing real people like Andre Malraux, Nogales occasionally hits a strange note of lyric violence: "In the morning light a bomb thrown from an airplane leaves behind a pretty, luminous wake. The tuning fork of space vibrates on being struck. ..."

Typical of his half-realistic, half-symbolic stories is "And in the Distance a Light . . ." that tells how a group of militiamen in Madrid find a spy flashing a light in the dark, kill him after they locate the spy to whom he is signaling. All night long they trace the light across the city, killing an engineer, an aviator, a girl, until by morning they have reached the front lines of the fascists, are still feverishly following the gleam when fascist bullets stop their search.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.