Books

Flora Baboin's breasts were "like Andalusian fruit in the basket of her folded arms." Lulu Bourriquet's were "firm, and their elongated form gave them a resemblance to Florentine breasts." Odette Auvergne's were "like two palpitating birds pining to break out of their cage." With such burgeoning bodices around it's no wonder residents of The Wicked Village (Simon and Schuster, $3.95) went straight to moral pot last 1933. The village is Clochemerle, in the Beaujolais region of rural France, and the wine, like Gabriel Chavallier's bawdy novel, is both heady and hale. The pages are peopled with rustic, frisky bumpkins who indulge their vices with great and disarming zest, even melon-breasted Melanie Boigne: "Mother of 15, all baptized and born in wedlock, excepting Etienne (who was got in the Fond-Mussu meadow in Springtime), but he's been regularized."

Ray Bradbury, at his best, is one of America's most distinctive and refreshing young writers. When he's not at his best, he totters dangerously on the rim of pretentiousness, preciousness, and what The New Yorker calls Infatuation With Sound of Own Words. Understandably, then, The October Country (Ballantine; hardbound, $3.50, paper-bound, 35c) is a collection of yarns that fall into two categories: the bad and the beautiful. Happily, the beautiful outnumber the bad. This worth-buying book includes The Next In Line, which had its first magazine publication in Playboy.

What does a top-drawer designer do when he thinks the baseboard of his life is fashioned of tired yellow pine? Why, he chucks his wife, and soon everything appears to be oak. Now this is a sensible premise, but in Man of the World (Rinehart, $3.50) our designer seems to have goofed. Iris, the booted spouse, has long chestnut hair, a Grecian profile, dreamy legs, is articulate as hell and a wow of a TV actress. In exchange for this structure, he takes up with Delia, whose specifications include pale cheeks, brown eyes, stubby fingers, a slight stutter and a dogged Methodism. You see, the designer doesn't want to be a man of the world. Between girls, gags and grief, author Stanley Kauffmann serves up 279 pages of Schweppervescent dialogue: "I almost didn't recognize you without a canape in your fist." "Dear child. Come...we're off for interminable fun." Somehow, the bus never leaves.

A cogent brotherhood of musical experts whittles down the bewildering mass of LPs available today in a compact, rather complacent, volume called Building Your Record Library (McGraw-Hill, $3.95). The 17-odd gentlemen who wield the pruning knife are associated with the sharp review staff of High Fidelity Magazine, and do their level best to tell you what's what in the glittering (and glutted) pre-Bach to post-Brubeck market. In between, you get the lowdown on chamber music, Broadway shows, the spoken word, folk music, even super-fi test records. The obvious fault with this sort of compilation is that it's out-of-date several months before it reaches the bookshops, but it still has value to the fledgling discomaniac who may be a little confounded by all that wax. A self-helper for those who want to expand their equipment ken is Hi-Fi (Random House, $2.95), which clears away a good bit of the gibberish surrounding the subject. In fact, author Martin Mayer practically takes your hand, steps gently into the breech ("In the tiny grooves of a record are a million microscopic wiggles"), goes on to dissect the current crop of turntables, speakers, enclosures, pickups, styli, tuners, tape -- on up as far as binaural sound components. The author's recommendations (in various price ranges) are included, along with a cluster of photographs, drawings and charts.

Fräulein (Crown, $3.50) is a kind of World War II version of Uncle Tom's Cabin, with Eliza played by a sad, simple girl named Erika Angermann. Erika gets caught in the grisly British-American bombing raid on Dresden; raped or roughed-up by a bellowing herd of Uzbecks, Belorussians, Bashkirs and Tajiks during their nightmarish entry into Berlin; insulted, pinched and seduced (gently) by a swarm of Americans. But these German girls are made of stern stuff: like Germany itself, Erika rebuilds both life and libido from the surrounding rubble heap -- quite successfully, at that. Author James McGovern is successful, too, in presenting a Leica-sharp enlargement of backyard war and occupation seen through the eyes of the beaten, and a deadly accurate portrait of all those sergeants from Scranton who lived like the Pukka Sahib long after the guns had stopped.