Short Notices

MANUELA by Demetrio Aguilera Malta. 304 pages Southern Illinois University. $6.95.

Her husband had just come home from the seas. He looked in the closet. "What are those military uniforms doing there?" he asked. "They're mine," said Manuela Saenz de Thorne. "I'm a colonel in the Liberation Army."

Manuela was more than a colonel in the army of Simon Bolivar, who liberated the west coast of South America from the Spaniards early in the last century. She was also 'Bolivar's political fixer and counselor and, for eight years, his mistress (her husband finally divorced her). As this book makes clear, "La Saenz," the illegitimate daughter of a Spanish nobleman and an Ecuadorian peasant girl, was a remarkable young woman. She raised money and equipment when the Liberator's armies were flagging, took over affairs of state when he was in the field, followed him through the Andes on horseback with a column of troops, twice foiled plots to assassinate him--and once held off four mutinous officers with her sword while Bolivar escaped through a bedroom window.

Author Aguilera Malta, a noted Ecuadorian writer, was able to draw on the best possible source for this historical novel: Manuela herself. In addition to her other activities, she was the official archivist for Bolivar's army, and her records document much of the tragedy, trivia and triumph that accompanied the 14-year battle to drive the godos (Spaniards) out of Latin America.

THE GLORY TENT by William E. Barrett. 72 pages. Doubleday. $2.95.

The author's gentle and poetic little 1962 novel The Lilies of the Field went almost unnoticed as a book, but made it fairly big as a motion picture. Actor Sidney Poitier won an Oscar portraying Homer Smith, the book's footloose handyman hero, who used ingenuity, faith and adobe bricks to build a Catholic chapel for a penniless order of German-speaking nuns. In this sequel, Homer works another miracle when, pressed into service as an evangelist at an old-fashioned hallelujah tent meeting, he inspires a crippled girl to walk. Although his tale is almost too short and slight to be put between hard covers, William Barrett (The Left Hand of God, Woman on Horseback) tells it with artful simplicity, and Homer retains the dimensions of a genuine folk hero.

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