Strangers to Paradise

By Melvin Maddocks

BOUGHT AND SOLD

by ALBERTO MORAVIA

Translated by ANGUS DAVIDSON

222 pages. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $6.95.

Fiction writers playing at divinity have been known to imagine themselves seagulls, cockroaches, even--what hath God Roth?--a breast. But the most deceptively difficult of all tricks, the trapeze swing with no net, is for a man to imagine himself a woman.

The 34 stories in this collection are all about women, written in the first person. Yet Alberto Moravia is no intellectual transvestite, going for novelty kicks in drag. For more than 45 years, in works like Two Women and Conjugal Love, he has practiced as the slightly old-fashioned literary psychologist to whom the soul of woman represents the final mystery.

What saves Moravia from post-Romantic banality is a special feeling for women as the quintessentially damned. It is as if, by depicting the life givers at the brink of spiritual death, he has dramatized for himself all the bleakness of modern existence.

These stories represent an almost too successful literary strategy of simulated monotony. Like the films of his fellow countryman Antonioni, Moravia's near fantasies are surreal studies of boredom at point of hysteria. There is little sense of time or place. Moravia's women seldom have names. They seem to inhabit a kind of limbo, a never land of listlessness. Often they are rich, like the antiheroine of I Haven't Time, who is the seventh-best-dressed woman in the world. But their money buys them nothing they want because they really have no wants they can recognize. That is their problem.

Sex affords them small pleasure. But they give themselves to different men in the doomed hope that they will find their identity at the point where all the lines of male force intersect. Even motherhood fails to bring Moravian women alive. Mirrors appear again and again, mocking the ladies who stand be fore them for being less real than their reflections. In Moravia's world, the furniture has more personality than the people who sit upon it.

What is the ultimate Moravia fable? Surely The Invisible Woman. As stripped of decor as its subject, this little anecdote depicts almost blandly the tragicomedy of a wife whose husband quite literally looks through her. The chilling aftereffect upon the reader makes the horror of science fiction banal by comparison.

Moravia's stories are, finally, calls to accounting of the lives of people who have wept only in their dreams. "Somebody knocked at the door and a terrible voice cried 'Telegram!' " Thus ends a story ironically titled Paradise. Dante could draw another circle of hell from the slump of the Moravian woman -- stifling her yawn, stifling her scream --as she shuffles to answer.

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