Krakatit, The Story Of A Deadly Formula That Would Destroy World

Krakatit, The Story Of
A Deadly Formula That
Would Destroy World

Krakatit, by Karel Capek, translated from the Czech by Lawrence Hyde. The Macmillan Company, New York, $2.50.

As a dramatist, Karel Capek already has become known to a considerable portion of the American public. Kraknitt, however, is his first full length novel published in English on this side of the Atlantic. And while it is a wildly imaginative book, which defies exact classification, it is so powerfully written that it has a sustaining interest for the discriminating reader.

Engineer Prokep, the central character, as a scientist, has searched so deeply into the secret heart of nature that he has achieved a formula for a destructive agency so terrible as to make him omnipotent. Krakatit is the name he has given it. A snuff box full will destroy the largest city.

A worthless colleague named Thomas plans to steal the formula and sell it to a big military establishment. While Propok is delirious, he takes the paper, but later it is discovered that part of the formula is missing.

Then begins the frantic search for it. Other countries, whose secret service agents have learned something of the facts, also join in the hunt. By them Propok is imprisoned, but finally escapes to be nursed back to health by the daughter of an old country doctor. This interlude is one of the most charming parts of the story.

But Propok cannot stop for tenderness. He, too, must recover the formula. It is at last in the automobile of the terrible Princess, before whom the speed limit and countersigns give way, that Prokop makes his escape, and after krakatit has proved its efficiency in blowing to fragments the factory in which it is being illegally manufactured and an anarchist center which is jamming the radios of the world, we say good-bye to him as the guest of a simple old farmer, who is showing him the kingdoms of the world and their glory through a hole in a cardboard peepshow!

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