Soliloquery

A FUGITIVE CROSSES HIS TRACKS-- Aksel Sandemose--Knopf ($2.50). Aksel

Sandemose used to write in Danish, his native language. Then he wrote a potboiler whose success disgusted him so that he left Denmark, settled in Norway, took to writing in Norwegian. Last week his second book in his foster-tongue was published in the U. S. Cover-to-cover readers of A Fugitive Crosses His Tracks did not have to be told that its author was pernickety. But when they heard that he was being likened to James Joyce, they wondered how much of his doubly-translated book had come through the wash. To old-fashioned readers who could remember George Gissing, A Fugitive Crosses His Tracks seemed to have much less in common with Ulysses than with The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft.

Hero-narrator of Author Sandemose's book, however, is not a retired litterateur but a retired murderer. Espen Arnakke, 34, has settled in Norway, become a respectable paterfamilias. Still haunted by the memory of the murder he committed 17 years ago, he tries to lay the ghost by telling the story of his life. But it is less a story than a one-sided conversation, a kind of soliloquery which wanders, digresses, returns again & again to the problem: why should this little boy have grown up to be a murderer? Author Sandemose's eccentrically concentric chronicle is impressively, sometimes oppressively, realistic.

Villain of the piece is Jante, the small town in Denmark where Espen grew up, and from whose iron influence on his poverty-ridden, unhappy childhood he never fully recovered. Even when he left home, shipped as a sailor to the U. S., worked as a lumberjack in Canada, married and settled in Norway, he found Jante everywhere, its belittling, ugly standards the almost universal law of life. Because he hated and feared Jante, suddenly saw the bully who took his girl as the personification of all Jante stood for, Espen killed him and felt little remorse.

Readers who can sympathize with Espen's introspective struggles may find in his story other less voluble characters who arouse as much sympathy: notably his patient father. Once when Espen muttered that he had not asked to be born. "Father looked calmly at me, stroked his beard, and said in an even voice: 'Nor did anyone, I believe, ever exactly send for yon in particular.' "

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