On the Greek Air

TEN SECONDS FROM Now (224 pp.)--Kay Cicellis--Grove Press (clothbound $3.50; paperback $1.45).

"The table was terribly untidy. Breadcrumbs soaked in the damp red stains, olive-stones floated in glasses, cigarette-ends sizzled in salad-plates. And we did not lift a little finger, we did not put a glass or a fork right, but just let the mess grow worse before us. We even leaned on it, growing callous, and delicately picked out of the wreckage the bare essentials. the bitter wine that was needed to keep the evening going."

This passage, midway through Ten Seconds from Now, not only attests to Greek Novelist Kay Cicellis' powers of evocation but also sums up the condition of her characters, who rely mainly on the bitter wine of unreciprocated love to keep their untidy and unhappy lives going. The setting is a radio station, apparently in Athens, and the characters are male news announcers and girl disk jockeys. A day-and-night jangle of pop love tunes plays ironic counterpoint to the staff's self-tortured prisoners of love. The narrator is a crippled male receptionist, a kind of latter-day Tiresias, blind to the purpose of his own life but preternaturally alert to the cross-purposes of all others.

Baldly told, without regard to Author Cicellis' luminous sensibility and genuine compassion. Ten Seconds from Now could seem as world-wearily neurasthenic as Franc,oise Sagan's round-robin tournaments of amour. Dominique loves Nondas who has eyes only for Erne. Diki is engaged to Vangos but pines for Jason who solaces himself with Aemilia. Monarches loves his wife Julia who leaves him for a nameless lover for whom she has waited for 15 years. Danae loves Simos who is too poor to offer marriage but can pay for an abortion. Sentimental Vivi is perhaps poorest of all--in love with the 2,000 records of the Light Music Department.

Youthful (31) Novelist Cicellis unravels this labyrinthine plot-skein with sure and steady hand. Her prose is as light-intoxicated as the air of her native Greece, 3ut her vision of life has a dark, existential Dathos. The book's title is inspired by an image from the radio studio--ten seconds to air time--and it implies that all of life s an absurd, hectic, fragmentary rehearsal :or living that paradoxically ends just at the moment that a man thinks himself ready to begin.

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