Venice Observed

THE SMILE ON THE FACE OF THE LION by P. M. Pasinetti. 341 pages. Random House. $5.95.

Bernardo is an Italian giant, a cultured Camera. Men stand in awe of him. Women compulsively fondle his "countryside muscles," nibble "the vast fleshy shell of his ear," imagine how many millions he is worth. Several. Born near Venice, he migrated early to America, and has become one of the leading U.S. art dealers. Magari! He is not happy. "Cosmic nausea" overwhelms him: "He looks like someone who is living in the third person." Pursued by "vague shadows of insanity," he returns to Italy seeking "a sense of reality" and "authentic relationships with people."

Poor Bernardo. Neither he nor the reader will find reality in this novel, and there are no authentic people at all. The absences are startling. In Venetian Red (1960), an intricate and fascinating chronicle of family life in Venice during the Fascist era, Author Pier-Maria Pasinetti proved himself a formidable 1 fabricator of character and incident, mood and meaning. In this novel, a sequel that brings the Venetian families up to date, Pasinetti gets bored with his story and starts setting off technical fireworks. When the smoke clears, Bernardo has experienced a verbal rerun of La Dolce Vita, while the reader has gained only a stiff neck and some spots before his eyes.

While it lasts, it's a spectacular show of style. Pasinetti, a Venetian who is currently professor of Italian at U.C.L.A., seems to have derived his literary manner in equal measure from Marcel Proust, Ian Fleming, Bernard Shaw and Michelangelo Antonioni--for whom he has done odd jobs of scriptwriting. Like Antonioni, he writes pattern instead of plot, and composes episodes that go nowhere slowly. Like Proust, he wanders for pages in indirect discourse--A tells B what C said to D about E--to populate and inflect his social scene, and sinks continually into interior monologue to liberate a character's stream of consciousness.

Like Shaw, Pasinetti hits off his minor personages with one swift stroke of wit: "She addresses people always with the air of a lady asking for road directions from behind the wheel of an extremely classy automobile." Like Fleming, he prefers to imagine that all women' are beautiful and that sex is the supreme experience. "Her entire leg was in close contact with his, pressed against him from the hip to the ankle. He moved his hand over her face in a slow, strong caress. 'You know,' she said, 'I don't take tranquilizers any more.' "

With such prose available, there should be no need.

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