Page "reviews" Paragraph 581

This latter failure is more than merely bad reportage and it is distinctly more important than it would have been had the author drawn Clerfayt as, say, a tournament golfer.

Hazards to life and limb on the golf course, while existent, are actuarially insignificant.

Race-drivers, on the other hand, are quite often killed on the circuit, and since it was obviously Mr. Remarque's intention to establish automobile racing as life in microcosm, one might reasonably have expected him to demonstrate precise knowledge not only of techniques but of mores and attitudes.

He does not.

The jacket biography describes him as a former racing driver, and he may indeed have been, although I do not recall having encountered his name either in the records or the literature.

Perhaps he has only forgotten a great deal.

The book carries a disclaimer in which Remarque says it has been necessary for him to take minor liberties with some of the procedures and formalities of racing.

The necessity is not clear to me, and, in any case, to present a case-hardened race-driver as saying he has left his car, which, or whom, he calls `` Giuseppe '', parked `` on the Place Vendome sneering at a dozen Bentleys and Rolls-Royces parked around him '' is not a liberty ; ;

it is an absurdity.