This is the first English edition of nine short stories, some of which have appeared previously in American magazines and anthologies. The translations are from the French and very good. Collectively, they testify to the fact that Gascar is a masterful writer, a first-class creator of theme-dictating moods which he evokes by describing the textures and contours of his exotic locales (very much in the style of the modern Japanese film), and a deft equilibrist who suspends his characters on the brink of madness, revelation, or despair. The quality of his writing abounds in "The Asylum." A woman, committed to a mental institution, is dressed in "the mad women's uniform," exposed to a matron "clumsy with anger," surrounded in part by "very old patients with snow-white hair, who no longer had the energy to be crazy, lulled by senility as though it were a cure." In "The Cistern," a man discovers water in a little Spanish town where "drought had turned life into a precarious miracle every last trace of which had to be preserved." He lingers in his decision - whether or not to inform the town of his discovery. One of the least successful is called "The Watershed." It concerns a woman missionary in the Philippines and her cascade into sensuality. "The Little Square," about a baker's wife and her romance with a young blacksmith, may very well turn out to be a little classic. Gascar tempers his prodigious talents in this one with economy. (Kirkus Reviews)