There is no Santa Claus here. Cendrars traveled and wrote without sentimentality. He had a good eye for the kind of desperation and depravity that is almost inspirational. He could not condescend, but saw with a rough, open wonder that human eccentricities are evidence of a will to persevere in a world that offers little solace. In these twelve short vignettes, compiled in 1957, he related episodes from his travels circa 1910-1930: a pianist in New Zealand who, like Cendrars, left an arm in the war; a mock manger on a Chinese hillside, erected by troops under the command of General Ma, with the carcass of a water buffalo, Three disemboweled Kings, and a Blessed Virgin carrying her head in an apron reminds Cendrars of a forgotten novel by Jules Janin called The Dead Donkey and the Guillotined Woman. The next year, having switched sides in the civil war, General Ma instructed his troops to build a boxing ring, where the bodies of beheaded prisoners were held upright on stakes and faced off against each other with sawed-off fists. The New Mexican Indians in a peyote crouch around the fire once raced horses down the lone road of the pueblo, pelted by watermelons, but now race cars bumper to bumper to the stateline to meditate under neon. Cendrars crossing the Brooklyn Bridge on Christmas Eve, dazzled and disoriented, wanders into a ritual slaughterhouse, the sure stroke of the blade flashing against the bloody vest of the rabbi. Occasionally a headless chicken slips through bloody hands and flies into a pile of baskets waiting to be dropped on to the back of idling trucks. In a manger in Bahía, a black cock impaled on a golden sword takes the place of the star of Bethlehem and a little Negress wiggles in the straw. Bloody disfigured soldiers in trenches are promised a Christmas furlough in Paris if they can kill a German. Holiday revéillon at Le Boeuf sur le Toit with Jean Cocteau, Maurice Revel, and the aristocratic transvestite and patroness of the avant-garde the Duchess d’Uzes. The French Jewish poet who converted to Catholicism after a rapturous mystical experience and lived in such intense poverty that he buttoned his overcoat to the neck, even in summer, to conceal his nakedness. A gamekeeper in the Ardennes Forest claimed to have a shoeshine that when applied to his boots attracted dozens of rabbits that willingly followed him into his kitchen for Christmas stew. Christmas in Rio at the height of the austral summer, when giant blue butterflies from the collection of a paralytic Countess (who refuses to accept that death is the necessary and unavoidable prelude to the transmigration of souls) fall from the roof-garden at the Hotel Gloria into an abyss of heat, perplexed, tipsy with sunshine. ( )