LAmour Terrible

UNARMED IN PARADISE (307 pp.) -Ellen Marsh -Macmillan ($4.50).

What is there left to say about love? Author Ellen Marsh seemingly says little in Unarmed in Paradise and yet has managed to say it all. The story is perhaps more spectacular because it happens in Paris, but anyone, however homebound, will feel the glow, the pain and the misery as surely as Author Marsh's lovers feel it in the city where it is presumed to be a byproduct of traveler's checks.

Carmian is the writing daughter of an American father and a German mother. She is alone in Paris and so sensitive, so vulnerable that the plight of a homeless cat can reduce her to tears. She drinks too much, writes too little and apparently wants nothing but the affection that a pointless life has denied her. When the young Russian named Dima comes along, the accident of love is as inevitable as the bump of a skidding taxicab on the Pont Royal. Their love affair begins with a drink, a look and a touch. It flames, gutters and flames again.

Dima is the son of White Russian parents, a suicide father and a mother who has somehow managed to keep a little money. Mamma's apartment is one of those Paris crow's nests where tea, scraps of food and family belongings are hoarded under beds and a running war is maintained with the concierge. Author Marsh, 36, who has some autobiographical credentials for her story, writes with authority about the grubby side of Parisian life, has woven the fly-by-night painters, writers and plain frauds into her story with the sureness of a Parisian landlady counting stitches into a sweater.

Dima is half child. He loves Carmian, yet is capable of beating her up. They live in poverty. She has a miscarriage. He never manages to get the divorce from his wife that he has promised. Their life is drunken, pointless; it lacks everything except passion and a kind of intermittent gentleness that at its best seems better than the best kind of conventional security. But Carmian finally learns that a lover who lives from day to day and embrace to embrace can only end by becoming a burden.

Unarmed in Paradise is written with rare grace and honesty. It is one of the best love stories to come along in many a year.

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