Anti-Worldly Loves

10:30 ON A SUMMER NIGHT (108 pp.) --Marguerlfe Duras--Grove ($2.95).

In the antiworld of the so-called anti-novelists of France, the characters often seem to grope toward each other like blind men buffeted in a high wind. Time moves slowly, emotions are muted, action is rare. The prevailing mood is one of hopelessness in the face of conditions neither invited nor understood. One of the masters of the genre is Marguerite Duras, 48, whose novel The Square was a random dialogue between two strangers who meet in a park, talk endlessly and go their separate ways. Her present book has slightly more action, but it, too, is really a long interior monologue that reads like a long sigh of regret.

A husband and wife, Pierre and Maria, are driving through Spain to Madrid, accompanied by a young girl, Claire, who is not yet Pierre's mistress but who plainly will be as soon as they can slip off to a hotel room. A violent thunderstorm forces them to stop for the night in a small town 150 miles short of Madrid. There they learn that a double murder has been committed; a young husband has found his wife in bed with another man and in accordance with the local code of honor has shot them both.

At 10:30 that evening Maria, standing on a hotel balcony, sees her husband kiss Claire on another balcony and almost simultaneously spots the murderer crouched on a nearby roof. She gets the car out and smuggles the murderer out of town past the patrolling police. A few hours later, she takes Pierre and Claire back to the field where she had left him only to find he has committed suicide. Saddened that they were unable to save him, they drive on to Madrid.

Author Duras tells a story well--as she proved in the script for the film Hiroshima Man Amour--and her eye and ear are unfailingly good. Precisely what they are telling her is another matter. 10:30 is a murky book, but in its anti-worldly way it seems to be saying that the two groups of people--the three travelers on the one hand, the murderer and his two victims on the other--are equally inadequate and equally doomed. Both Maria and Pierre admire the murderer for the reckless fury of his act ("We could have arranged a good life for him," says Maria, "and perhaps I would have loved him"), but he lies dead in a field. Maria and Pierre want to love one another, but their torpor is as fatal to love as the murderer's angry bullet. At the hotel in Madrid, Maria lies wrapped in "the odor of their dying love," listening to the sounds from the adjoining room as Claire prepares to receive Pierre in a love equally doomed to dissolution.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.