There is a story, "A Human Condition," in [Boy with a Trumpet] which describes the desperate search for liquor of a bereaved husband. He needs the liquor as armor against his grief and also to shield him from the disapproving eyes of his wife's relatives. Having managed, one way or another, to get enough to drink, he maintains a drunken dignity on the way to the cemetery but, on reaching the edge of the open grave, totters and falls in, thus earning a deathless reputation for passionate devotion and heroic grief.

This melange of grief, irony and humor might better have been the title story, since it is typical of most of these tales in its racy, earthy smell of thoroughly human conditions like the canvases of Brueghel and the tales of Chaucer. Because the stories are told by a sophisticated and honest writer, few of the human...