Gnats in Amber

THE NIGHT IN LISBON by Erich Maria Remarque. 244 pages. Harcourt, Brace & World. $4.95.

If he has done nothing else, Erich Remarque has given to modern fiction a new sort of nonhero--the nameless and rootless refugee who is forever on the run. In Remarque's new novel, the refugee goes by the name of Schwarz--but Schwarz, of course, is not his real name. He has taken the name and the identification papers of a dead man named Schwarz (who in turn had taken them from another dead man named Schwarz). The obvious implication of this hall-of-mirrors symbolism is that loss of identity is the chronic condition of modern man and that a single name will serve a generation.

The time is 1942. Two shell-shocked survivors of the Nazi terror meet in Lisbon and talk the night away. They are strangers, but they understand each other quickly because they have a common latter-day heritage "that was as much a part of German culture as Goethe and Schiller." They both know how to alter passports, how to dress inconspicuously to put off the police, how to conceal a vial of poison or perhaps a razor blade as a last remedy if they should fall into the hands of the Gestapo. The man named Schwarz describes a common enough European odyssey--the flight from Germany to Paris with his wife, internment in the early months of the war, escape and flight again across France until they are carried with the flood of human driftwood to a last beach in Lisbon. There Schwarz's cancer-ridden wife commits suicide. To the fatalistic companion who has listened to Schwarz talk through the long night in Lisbon, the tale later seems reminiscent of an insect embalmed in a flat piece of amber--"the death struggle of a gnat, preserved in a cage of golden tears, while its fellows had frozen or been eaten, and vanished from the face of the earth."

The best and the worst of Remarque are in the book. His settings--hotels, restaurants, railway stations--have the gritty taste of reality, and no novelist is more adept at suggesting the rictus of terror that distorted the face of Europe as it slid nightmarishly into war. But Remarque's derelict vision of humanity allows little room for pity, and none at all for rage. "What has my life been?" asks Schwarz at the end. The man across the table replies with a shrug: "It was your life. Isn't that enough?" The question calls for an answer--which Novelist Remarque never supplies.

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