THE REVOLT OF THE FISHERMEN.

By ANNA SEGHERS, Longmans, Green andCompany, New York. 1930.

This novel, which won the Kleist prize in Germany for 1929, is a book for the reader who likes his fiction straight. Miss Segher's pen has been steeped in the gall of pure realism. Look not here for the glories of progress for what you will find is a picture of the terrific futility of life among the fisher folk of St. Barbara.

The book depicts in searing paragraphs the age old struggle between simple people, crushed both by poverty and their natural environment, with their oppressors, the owners of the fishing boats, who squeeze with the ruthless greed of the Yahoo, the very life blood of the fishermen, their wives and their children.

The defeat of the fishermen in their strike for a "three-fifths share and seven pfennig a kilo" is as inexorable as death and their fate is told with the author's full appreciation of the tragic sense of life. The fisherman, Kedennek, Mary, the street woman, and Andreas, fired by a dream he knows not what, are unforgettable types. Highly praised by English critics it is to be hoped the book has a reading here. To prosperous America it must come as something of a shock.

Department of Comparative Literature.