Girls in Goulash

THE DUKAYS (795 pp.)--Lajos Zilahy --Prentice-Hall ($3.50).

The note said: "Please be at Apartment Eight on the first floor of No. 15 Blaue Lampe Strasse at 6 this evening." Beautiful Countess Kristina Dukay popped into her "sheer, cobweb-thin, rose-colored slip" and a blue dress, dabbed on some stuff called Chanson du Narcisse and scuttled off to the assignation . . . The door opened, and in came a man wearing a beard and yellow spectacles. As Kristina teetered in a state of pleasant giddiness, the man raised his hand, ripped off his beard and spectacles, and stood revealed--the Emperor Karl of Austria himself!

Readers who find false beards passe may as well pass up The Dukays, even though the publishers are boosting it as their "major book for the spring of 1949," and Author Lajos Zilahy as "Hungary's foremost novelist." The Dukays was a Hungarian bestseller in 1947; probably nothing but a popular revolt against tinsel fiction can stop it from being equally successful in the U.S.

Author Zilahy (rhymes with feel a knee) is the author of nine previous novels and 19 plays which have made him popular at home and in Spain and Italy as well. The Dukays is his version of the decline of the West, from the turn of the last century to World War II; it follows the decaying lives of members of an aristocratic Hungarian family. Like many ostensibly moral stories, The Dukays' chief feature is not so much its somber conclusion in the inferno as its spicy descriptions of how the characters get there.

Countess Kristina, who is the heroine of the first half of the book, becomes Emperor Karl's secret agent in World War I; her scurryings around in Parisian underthings, waving secret documents, make Upton Sinclair's Lanny Budd look like a timid traveler in an old suit of B.V.D.s. When Kristina collapses into the arms of Spain's Alfonso XIII, her sister, Countess Zia, takes over for the between-wars decades. When at last, after more than 700 pages, Hitler and the Russians start divvying up what's left of the Dukay world, many a reader may feel an unreasonable sense of relief.

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