Adventure: Fictional & True

Blaze of the Sun, by Jean Hougron (Farrar, Straus & Young; $3.75). If all the Frenchmen in Indo-China behaved more or less like the ones in this novel, no wonder they lost the war. Amid all the offensives and ambushes, Novelist Hougron's characters worry chiefly about who goes to bed with whom--or more particularly, with My-Diem, a shapely Annamite who used to be a Communist agent, married a French colonial official and, before the book is over, earns herself one of the hottest spots in the Buddhist hell by committing adultery with yet another Frenchman. Along the way, she also has a brief, involuntary fling with a brutish Communist guerrilla commandant.

Devices and Desires, by E. Arnot Robertson (Macmillan; $3.50). Another war story, with a younger but almost as arresting heroine: 13-year-old Hebe, who after five years of wartime wandering with her refugee Dutch father, has become a kind of junior femme fatale. She loves no one, trusts no one, speaks half a dozen languages picked up along the way, lies almost as easily as she smiles, and has only one purpose: to get out of Greece and back to England and the safe, respectable provincial house where her mother's people lived. When Hebe finally leaves Greece, British Authoress Robertson seems to lose interest in the story. But until then, with an eye as piercing as Greek winter sunlight, she watches the cruel, stunted life of that bitter land during the civil war, when a whole village could be butchered for a few gold coins, or shrewdly examines a pair of lady relief workers ("It's easy to tell that your friend is an Englishwoman," says one refugee. "She talks to all these people as if they were animals. The sort one is kind to.").

People of the Blue Water, by Flora Gregg Iliff (Harper; $3.75), is the unusual story of how Author Iliff half a century ago taught school to an inaccessible Indian tribe called Havasupai. The Havasupai numbered only 250 and lived in Arizona at the bottom of an eight-mile canyon wall, 70 miles from the nearest town, which was a hot, dusty hamlet that "looked as if it had been blown in on a dry wind and stranded." Author Iliff served as teacher, doctor, judge, superintendent, and, incidentally, weather reporter to the U.S. Government. Her story is full of fascinating detail (e.g., at puberty, Havasupai girls were placed on a bed of heated stones and instructed all night in the facts of life for a wife and homemaker). A quiet, good-humored book about a vanishing life.

A Woman in the Polar Night, by Christiane Ritter (Button; $3), is the story of another intrepid woman and her adventures in a colder climate than Arizona. Frau Ritter lived for a year on the north coast of Spitsbergen in a hut ten feet square, with her husband and a young Norwegian hunter, in temperatures that sank to 40DEG below zero. To the north lay Anxiety Bay, to the south Distress Hook, to the east Misery Bay and to the west the Bay of Grief. Not a tree or shrub rose from the sea of stones that covered the desolate land, and the nearest settlement was 156 miles away. Frau Ritter lived on seal and bear meat, survived raging blizzards, solitude, and the long winter night. In the end, she discovered the typical Arctic philosophy--a little like the sensation just before freezing--that nothing really matters very much. An unpretentious but arresting book about life south of nowhere.

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