Missing the Point

INCUBUS by Giuseppe Berto. 388 pages. Knopf. $5.95.

James Joyce demonstrated among other things that even in the works of a genius the stream of consciousness not infrequently turns out to be a Mississippi of malarkey, but the lesson seems to have been lost upon Giuseppe Berto, a well-known Italian novelist (Il Cielo e Rosso) whose obvious talents fall considerably short of genius but whose latest novel, Incubus, nevertheless opens the sluices of association and requires the reader to navigate as best he can a torrent of reminiscence, admittedly autobiographical but attributed in the text to an aging author who some years previously, on the occasion of his father's death at the age of 80, had suffered an emotional trauma, and in an unconscious attempt to elude the consequences changed his address and his mistress, never suspecting that Freud is not so easily mocked and that, in fact, one morning a few months later he would "pee blood," suffer frightful pains in his abdomen and shortly thereafter undergo an ulcer operation only to discover that he has no ulcer, that in fact there isn't a doctor in Italy who can explain his symptoms, which nevertheless increase in severity and peculiarity, the pains accompanied more and more often by such vivid evidences of acute anxiety--colitis, exhaustion, "testicular commotion" and finally even the delusion of facing an "attack by crooked lines"--that in time the wretched man is persuaded to consult a psychoanalyst, an experience almost as painful for the hero as it is for the reader, who may or may not be persuaded to hang on for more than 100 pages while Author Berto composes an intense but trite idvertisement for himself and incidentally reminds the critics yet once more that Freud may be good for people but he sure is bad for writing, though not half so bad as Berto's habit of composing marathon sentences that go on and on and on for five, ten, 20 and once even for 37 pages with so little artistic reason for being that the puzzled reader may well wonder if the whole book is not simply a typographical catastrophe caused by the absence, on Berto's typewriter, of a .

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