North to South

FOUR STORIES (245 pp.)--Sigrid Undset --Knopf ($3.75).

THE LITTLE KAROO (188 pp.)--Pauline Smith--Vanguard ($3.50).

The short stories in these two collections have widely separate backgrounds--Norway and South Africa--but they both deal with the early 20th century, and the societies described in both are like cocoons with no hint of the world outside or the tumultuous sprawl of history.

The late, famed Nobel prizewinner Undset (she died in 1949) writes of desperate Norwegian spinsters who are roughly used by all who know them, of babies who bring brief happiness to love-starved households and then sicken and die, of people who hesitate to rescue others for fear of being responsible for the lives they save. The conclusion of each sweetly-sad story is usually damp with tears: Thjodolf ends with its heroine reeling to her bed, where "the weeping came, bitter and burning"; Simonsen ends with its hero on a train speeding away from his loved ones forever: "He wiped his eyes. There must be One Above who decided these things. That must be his consolation."

British Author Smith, who died early this year, deals with the Little Karoo, an isolated South African plateau peopled by pious, hardfisted Boer farmers who are as trapped by their environment and culture as any of Author Undset's bedeviled Norwegians. For them, too, "man is distant, but God is near." In The Miller, a baffled man expresses his outrage at the approach of death by browbeating his timid wife, who runs "to serve him with quick, fluttering movements like those of a frightened hen"; in The Sinner, a lifetime of hard work and small returns explodes in passion when a sharecropper runs off with another woman, then humbly comes home when his wife sends him a note saying: "God forgive me ... if I should judge you." These stories were originally published in 1925, and the problem of white and black that is currently convulsing South Africa is touched on in only one; grimly and perhaps prophetically, Ludo-vitje describes an African native as the only man strong enough to dig the graves for the white family that employs him.

Both books may have an odd effect on readers, for they are set in the era before the modern welfare state--capitalist or socialist--encroached on the life of the individual. Whatever the merit of the "good old days," these stories seem to refute the notion that they were happier. In tale after tale, the plots turn on the tragedies of men and women shrugged off by society and left to the mercy of God and the charity of strangers.

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