Bitter Ashes

THE SKY IS RED (397 pp.)--Giuseppe Berto--New Directions ($3.50).

At the end of the battle of El Alamein, an Italian army officer named Giuseppe Berto was captured. He spent three years in a Texas prison camp. When he returned to Italy at the war's end, he found a publisher willing to take a chance on the rough first novel he had written behind the wire. Unexpectedly it became a bestseller in a country where few can afford to buy books.

It is not hard to see why. The Sky Is Red is a perfect reflection of the numbness beyond despair felt by a people still suffering from the results of dictatorship and defeat. Indifferent to the larger issues of the war, Berto writes only about its limited consequences in the lives of a few children.

In a bombing raid that wrecked and burned their town, Carla and Giulia, cousins in their mid-teens, lost their grandmother in whose house they had lived. Alone and hungry, they turned for help to Carla's boy friend, Tullio, leader of a gang which preyed on the ruins of the town and prepared arms for a future Communist uprising. Tullio installed them in an abandoned brothel, where the three set up house, living off the money Tullio stole and Carla made as a prostitute.

After several months they were joined by a boy, Daniele, whose middle-class parents had been killed in the raid. Forced to assume adult responsibilities and overwhelmed by more than adult miseries, these four children drift and suffer, snatching moments of happiness, the full meaning of which they are too young--or perhaps already too old--to grasp.

As a novelist, Giuseppe Berto has a lot to learn. He knows very little about how to pace a novel, how to build up climaxes and tighten tensions; he often touches the incongruous by putting much too mature speeches into the mouths of his babes. But most U.S. readers will find in The Sky Is Red, as in such recent Italian films as Open City and Shoe-Shine, a raw and brutal vitality that slicker performances often lack.

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