The Man Who Lived

BARABBAS (180 pp.)--Par Lagerkvisf --Random House ($2.75).

Until a fortnight ago, when he won the 1951 Nobel Prize for literature, 60-year-old Paer Lagerkvist was little known outside his native Sweden. But at home he has long enjoyed a solid reputation. Thirty years ago, he was writing plays that reminded fellow Swedes of their countryman, August Strindberg. Since those days he has turned out a steady flow of poetry, drama, novels and short stories.

Paer Lagerkvist was brought up to devout Lutheranism. Grown, he turned agnostic. But his best novel, Barabbas, now published in the U.S., sounds as though Author Lagerkvist has never lost a deep preoccupation with, faith. Barabbas is a spare, subtle story about the struggle of a brutish man to understand the meaning of Christianity.

Memory of Golgotha. Barabbas, the cutthroat who was spared in place of Jesus, carried the memory of the crucifixion with him all his life. He had been merely exultant and curious at first, when he stood on the hill of Golgotha to watch. But he soon felt uneasy. Then the hill was caped in darkness, and the crucified man cried out, "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" When Barabbas returned to his cronies, he morosely ignored their celebration of his release.

At dawn of the third day, a worried Barabbas hid himself near the sepulchre: Would the dead man really rise from the grave, as he had heard some of the man's disciples predict? Examining the sepulchre, Barabbas was amazed to find it empty; but, of course, he reasoned, the disciples had stolen off with the body.

And besides, he reflected, how could Jesus, if he were the son of God, have permitted himself to be crucified by Roman soldiers? But later, though he still thought the claims of the disciples absurd, Barabbas found himself wandering through the alleyways of the lower city, where the new faith flourished among the poor. Barabbas liked to hear them talk about their queer doctrines--love one another, they said. He could not fathom it, but he wanted to hear it.

Words to the Darkness. What happened next to Barabbas--whether he retired to the desert of Judah or joined the Samaritans or simply continued his banditry--Novelist Lagerkvist does not attempt to say.* But Lagerkvist does picture him in two final scenes. As an aging slave of the Romans, Barabbas meets a Christian whose piety nearly converts him--but when threatened with death by the Romans he backs out. No, he says, he has no god. It is true that he has inscribed the name "Christos Jesus" on his slave disc, but that is only "because I want to believe," not because he really does.

At the end Barabbas is in Rome, seeking out the Christians in their catacombs and still trying to understand them. By an irony, he is among those crucified for the burning of the city. "When he felt death approaching, that which he had always been so afraid of, he said out into the darkness, as though he were speaking to it:--To thee I deliver up my soul."

As a parable, Barabbas is open to many interpretations. As a picture of a human soul, with or without parable, it is moving and convincing.

* And Christian legend, which has virtually ignored Barabbas, offers Lagerkvist little to go on.

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