Short Notices

FIRE FROM HEAVEN by Michel Bataille. 310 pages. Crown. $5.95.

Joan of Arc was put to death on a pile of burning fagots. Gilles de Rais, the French nobleman who fought at her side at Orleans, met a somewhat different end. He turned out to be a fagot who dismembered and burned a pile of little boys--800 of them, by the best estimates of the time. In its outlines, this historical novel is undoubtedly Sade-but-true. More debatable is the book's claim that Marshal de Rais was not entirely a monster, but "the magnified and distorted image of everyman." Everyman? De Rais, whose atrocities many believe to be the inspiration for the Bluebeard legend, became overlord of Anjou at the age of 13, a marshal of France at 26, and he never betrayed a friend. Once, when his loyal soldiers were helping him destroy the evidence by throwing 46 rotting bodies on the flames, Gilles de Rais, in this version of the story, actually sat down and asked himself this question: "Hadn't he lived life too fully?"

Author Bataille, a screenwriter and novelist who was a finalist in last year's Prix Goncourt--France's foremost literary award--has perhaps revived Gilles de Rais's life a bit too fully. For mass horrors explicitly described, this book certainly has few rivals. Nowhere else, for example, can the reader find a set of instructions for playing ball with a human head.

THE THOUSAND HOUR DAY by W. S. Kuniczak. 628 pages. Dial. $7.95.

No sane person doubts any longer that war is hell. Even so, many readers of this massive and unremittingly gory novel are bound to wonder if the German conquest of Poland in World War II was actually the unrelieved hellish nightmare that Author Kuniczak makes it out to be. Heads are lopped off, noses pulverized, bellies carved up, teeth knocked out--and occasionally somebody is even shot.

The Polish-born author, a naturalized U.S. citizen, says that he drew upon the recollections of 700 Poles, Germans, Englishmen and Frenchmen to get his material; and it is otherwise obvious that many of the episodes here are factual. But even in warfare, carnage is relieved by inactivity or restless boredom. The only respite Kuniczak gives his readers is short inconsequential conversations and brief bursts of attempted Joycean lyricism. Laboriously, he relates the personal agonies of a one-armed Polish general and his mistress, a disillusioned American correspondent, a Jewish conscript from the Warsaw ghetto and an idealistic young Nazi officer. Kuniczak seldom strays far from the heated sights and shrieks of battle. At any rate, he seems to have a gift for divining the public taste. This is a Book-of-the-Month-Club selection.

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