[Matthews is an American-born editor, essayist, poet, autobiographer, and biographer. In the following review, he praises Cider with Rosie, also published as The Edge of Day, as "funny, unsentimental and beautiful."]

Suicide, said Camus, is the one really serious philosophical problem. The only simple answer to the questionable human condition is the act that ends all problems. Any other answer ignores the question or shelves the problem. And yet there is another sort of response, oblique as morning sunlight, irrational as joy, absurd as a human being—an acceptance of life that is also a welcoming and an embrace. Perhaps this response is less rare than we suppose, but only a poet can put it into words.

Laurie Lee has done it. Blessed be his name. These recollections of his country boyhood in the West of England are a testament to the wonder, joy, and painful absurdity of being alive, a letter of thanks whose address is plain to be seen: to life, with love. The Edge of Day is funny, unsentimental and beautiful. Huck Finn would have given it his complete approval.

The book begins with Lee's earliest memories: of the day when his large fatherless family (his father was an absentee) moved into a cottage in a Gloucestershire valley. Three-year-old Laurie, set down in a field where the June grass was taller than he was, felt abandoned and lost. "High overhead ran frenzied larks, screaming, as though the sky were tearing apart…. I put back my head and howled, and the sun hit me smartly on the face, like a bully."

Soon he was wriggling and darting around his new world like a tadpole in a pond. In the old cottage's scullery he

discovered water—a very different element from the green crawling scum that stank in the garden tub. You could pump it in pure blue gulps out of the ground; you could swing on the pump handle and it came out sparkling like liquid sky. And it broke and ran and shone on the tiled floor, or quivered in a jug, or weighted your clothes with cold. You could drink it, draw with it, froth it with soap, swim beetles across it, or fly it in bubbles in the air. You could put your head in it, and open your eyes, and see the sides of the bucket buckle, and hear your caught breath roar, and work your mouth like a fish, and smell the lime from the ground.

Here is the morning of his first day of school:

My sisters surrounded me, wrapped me in scarves, tied up my boot laces, thrust a cap on my head, and stuffed a baked potato in my pocket.

"What's this?" I said.

"You're starting school today."

"I ain't. I'm stopping 'ome."

"Now, come on, Loll. You're a big boy now."

"I ain't."

"You are."

"Boo-hoo."

They picked me up bodily, kicking and bawling, and carried me up the road.

"Boys who don't go to school get put into boxes and turn into rabbits, and get chopped up on Sundays."

I felt this was overdoing it rather, but said no more after that.

I arrived at school just three feet tall and fatly wrapped in my scarves. The playground roared like a rodeo…. The rabble closed in; I was encircled; grit flew in my face like shrapnel. Tall girls with frizzled hair, and huge boys with sharp elbows, began to prod me with hideous interest. They plucked at my scarves, spun me around like a top, screwed my nose, and stole my potato.

With a family of eight, life in the small cottage was crowded but also "as separate as notes in a scale." The kitchen was their common-room, the presiding genius their mother,

a country girl: disordered, hysterical, loving. She was muddled and mischievous as a chimney jackdaw, she made her nest of rags and jewels, was happy in the sunlight, squawked loudly at danger, pried and was insatiably curious, forget when to eat or ate all day, and sang when sunsets were red.

She lived by the easy law of the hedgerow, loved the world and made no plans, had a quick holy eye for natural wonders and couldn't have kept a neat house for her life…. I can still seem to hear her blundering about the kitchen: shrieks and howls of alarm, an occasional oath, a gasp of wonder, a sharp command to things to stay still. A falling coal would set her hair on end, a loud knock make her leap and yell; her world was a maze of small traps and snares acknowledged always by cries of dismay.

At the same time "she fed our oafish wits with steady, imperceptible shocks of beauty … by the unconscious revelation of her loves, an interpretation of man and the natural world so unpretentious and easy that we never recognized it then, yet so true that we never forgot it."

The village life was crowded too: it contained murder, suicide, incest, rape, "an acceptance of violence as a kind of ritual which no one accused or pardoned," and more innocent oddities of festivals, outings, gossip, first love, the freezing hardships and sweaty delights of winter and summer.

Here is the compact record of a visit to relations:

We sit down and eat, and the cousins kick us under the table, from excitement rather than spite. Then we play with their ferrets, spit down their well, have a fight, and break down a wall. Later we are called for and given a beating, then we climb up the tree by the earth closet. Edie climbs highest, till we bite her legs, then she hangs upside down and screams. It has been a full, far-flung, and satisfactory day; dusk falls, and we say good-bye.

Laurie Lee is a poet, not yet so well known in America as he is in England: a poet of the old tradition, at home with all sorts. Though he looks younger than his forty-five years, he has not had an easy life. At 20 he left home to make his own way in London, and has earned his living, sometimes slim pickings, as an independent writer. His travels about Europe (he has never been to America) have taken him often to Spain, where he has lived off the land by playing the violin in streets and cafes.

He has published several books of poems, a verse play and a travel book on Spain, A Rose for Winter. He and his lovely wife, Cathy, live in London's Chelsea, a favorite district of artists and writers.

The Edge of Day has already won an extraordinary wide public: it was a best seller in England (under its original title of Cider With Rosie). Parts of it appeared in magazines; excerpts were serialized for two weeks in a popular daily newspaper in London; passages were broadcast over the B.B.C. It is now an April dual Book-of-the-Month choice in America.

Good books don't always sell; the best-seller lists are usually swamped by the second- and third-rate. But now and then, once in a blue moon, a book appears that deserves its success. This time the moon is blue, and The Edge of Day is the book.