HENRY, STUART. Villa Elsa. *$2 Dutton
20–2260
“‘Villa Elsa’ is the actual, everyday family life of the middle-class German before the war—nothing glossed over, nothing exaggerated or fanciful. It is Mr Henry’s personal experience expressed in the form of a novel. The Bucher family lived in Loschwitz, a suburb of Dresden. Herr Bucher, the father, is a stolid, unwashed, collarless, healthy and obese German ‘Vater’; his wife, Frau Bucher, is coarse, red-faced, heavy-handed, snarling and shouting, at the top of her lungs, her fierce hatred of England. Elsa, the only daughter, has the usual tow hair, is stupidly healthy, reads Heine, tries to be sentimental, but is essentially matter of fact. Rudolph, the eldest son, is in secret a government spy, reporting upon their visitor, Gard Kirtley, from America. He is a spruce young engineer, militaristic, dissolute, despising all decent women, and continually hinting of Der Tag. Ernst, a pale boy of fifteen, studies eighteen hours out of the twenty-four, quotes falsified history, and particularly discredits all American institutions. Gard Kirtley believes he has fallen in love with Elsa, but her stolid indifference and phlegmatic stupidity finally overpower him.”—Bookm
“The chief merit of the book is that the reader is bound to feel its truth. There is no attempt at fine writing or that easy familiarity with aristocratic court life, so often affected by English novelists, which, while it adds a gloss to the story, never wears the features of actual experience.” J: S. Wood
+ Bookm 51:361 My ’20 1600w
“While the story is not uninteresting in itself, it loses both in vividness and in artistic value by being constantly kept subservient to the author’s determination to inform and to teach.”
+ − N Y Times 25:164 Ap 11 ’20 1000w Review 2:436 Ap 24 ’20 180w
“For English readers this book has probably come to birth too late by some six years. His picture is unconvincing too, because it is the outcome of a mood which, in this country at least, has exhausted itself.”
− + The Times [London] Lit Sup p13 Ja 6 ’21 450w