European Bestseller

THE DOCTORS (441 pp.)--Andre Soubiran--Putnam ($3.95).

One of the bestselling books in Europe is a novel about doctors. Its hero, Jean Nerac, tells his own first-person story as a student at the Paris Faculty of Medicine.

The reader follows Jean into a dissecting room, where he cuts up cadavers; a slum, where he meets a leper; a hovel, where he hears a baby "leave the mother's belly with a moist squelching sound"; a ward, where he observes a woman choke to death of slow asphyxia, and hears from the puffed lips of a badly burned man "the most piercing shrieks that suffering can ever have brought forth"; an operating room, where he watches a leg being amputated at the thigh as a little surgical saw bites splinters off the bone and the limb breaks away with "a dry snapping noise."

Pathology at times gives way to sex, e.g., Jean takes the reader to the annual Interns' Ball, one of the most remarkable orgies allowed anywhere in the world. But as in U.S. novels about young doctors, Jean decides at the end that he wants to settle down with a nice girl and devote himself to curing the sick. Few readers will have to be told that French Author Andre Soubiran is the director of a pharmaceutical firm to realize how expert he is at dispensing bromides.

Nonetheless, his heavy-handed novel has sold 400,000 copies in France, Belgium and Switzerland. It has been translated into German, Italian and Swedish, and Spanish, Danish and Dutch editions are being prepared. As the U.S. edition appears. European sales have pushed close to 1,000,000 and are going strong.

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