Cripure

BITTER VICTORY-Louis Guilloux-Mc-Bride ($2.50).

As was the case with so many of his woes, Cripure got his nickname from his students. He lectured on philosophy in a small French provincial city, but when he spoke on the Critique of Pure Reason, the students changed it to the Cripure of Tique Reason, and called him Cripure. He was a huge, clumsy, nearsighted, embittered old man whose feet were so enormous no one could take him seriously. Once he had been a promising young author with a pretty yellow-haired wife and a reputation based on his The Wisdom of the Medes.

Now, in 1917, he had a slatternly housekeeper named Maia, four dogs, a secret hoard of gold, a deep contempt for himself and his hypocritical colleagues, bitter memories of his wife and of the day he lost her, of when he once entered a crowded room. saw her talking with another man, and felt that people were smiling at him.

Last week this unprepossessing figure was the central character of one of the strongest French novels since Celine's Journey to the End of the Night. The sixth book of a 37-year-old, self-educated Frenchman, it has much in common with Celine's masterpiece in its mood of intense disgust, its savage satirical portraits, its hatred of hypocrisy and its wild, grotesque humor. But unlike Journey to the End of the Night, it is compact and tightly-woven. the action taking place in 24 hours and the large cast of characters representing the main types of French provincial society at a moment of great tension. Conceived in the grand manner of pre-War fiction, with a gigantic mock-heroic central character and a host of petty Flaubertian supernumeraries, it is nevertheless modern in spirit, presents a picture of social anarchy that few readers are likely to forget.

It begins with Cripure cruelly rebuffing one of his old students who, on the eve of leaving for the front, has come to him for advice and help. It carries him through his classes, where his students pull all their dirty tricks, through his drunken afternoon, when agonizing memories assail him, into the climactic, ridiculous night, when he finds himself challenged to a duel. Around him tragedies worse than his own are piling up. The headmaster's son has been shot; French troops have mutinied; there have been riots at the railway as the troops embarked for the front; the daughter of a town official has robbed her father and started for Paris; an embittered young soldier, wounded, has broken with his parents. In all of them, as in himself, Cripure finds more than adequate support for his belief that human beings are contemptible.

In a riot at the railway station Cripure takes the part of the soldiers, suddenly biffs a distinguished, patriotic colleague and is challenged to a duel. As he prepares his will in the certainty that he will be killed, strange things happen: his housekeeper, whom he had expected to be greedy for his money, turns out to try to fight for him. Others rush to his defense, old friends appear, his opponent is caught in some shabby trickery and Cripure saved. But the old faker, more startled at humanity's occasional goodness than at its depravity, ends his moment of peace, shoots himself.

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