Tourist Trap

By Melvin Maddocks

TRAVELS TO THE ENU by Jakov Lind

St. Martin's Press; 126 pages; $11.95

In 1938, when Jakov Lind was an eleven-year-old schoolboy, the Nazis goose-stepped into his home city of Vienna, sending him fleeing to Holland and a lifetime of Diaspora. Something more than a Jew without a country, Lind became a displaced artist as well, without a sure tradition or even a language. He wrote at first in German; now he uses English. He lives in London, in New York, in Majorca. He has variously conducted his literary experiments in short stories (Soul of Wood), novels (Landscape in Concrete), autobiography (Counting My Steps) and even scores of radio plays. Yet few contemporary writers have been so singleminded. During all his wanderings he has clung obsessively to the original question from that day when Vienna became "one big swastika." How does a witness register the madness of his times without going mad himself?

Like Giinter Grass, his old colleague in the German writers' impromptu workshop Group 47, Lind has evolved less an answer to lunacy than a technique for exposing it. In every work he manages to reduce history to a wild nightmare from which one wakes up laughing. In his latest novel, with a nod to Jonathan Swift, grand master of the savage laugh and the surreal voyage, Lind sets sail on one of his most inspired trips.

A certain disgruntled writer, Orlando, and half a dozen other tourists find themselves shipwrecked on the island of the Enu, a very odd little South Pacific island. The men wear nests in their hair, where clever birds roost--"feathered superegos" who do the thinking for the hominoids when problems get knotty. On the head of King IT the 42nd perches the imperial vulture. His Majesty, built like a sumo wrestler, rides in a mobile throne on the back of a 300-year-old sea turtle, painted every color of the rainbow, which carries him at a 1-m.p.h. crawl.

On Enu it is an express. There is no place to go, no work to do. Physical labor is a status symbol that an Enu pays to perform. An Enu need not raise a sweat even for food. The natives and their inadvertent guests eat excrement processed to look like conventional food. Ambrosia comes from the sewers. Guano is refined to an elixir of life.

Sex is free, abundant and pointless.

Death has no sting. It is the custom for an Enu to go out of sight to die--conveniently underground. From sheer boredom the inhabitants invent their wars, like board games. They do not even care if they win. Winning can be a problem. "Win a war and you have to make the enemy do your will," the Enu Defense Minister complains. "What will? We have no will. We even lack a will to live. We no longer need it."

Enu entropy is contagious. After a while Orlando is confessing his own slavish wish for a nesting birdbrain to take over: "I experience this vacuum just a few inches above my head. This empty space of unknowing."

The one unforgivable sin in any Lind world is logic. Are the Enu a race of mutants--survivors of a nuclear bomb experiment? Or are they the missing link--a throwback to the age of reptiles? Is the island paradise or purgatory? At different times, Lind has it both ways. Consistency, as he sees it, is the hobgoblin of those without other hobgoblins.

The only real drama on the Enu island is leaving it, and even that may not count. Orlando decides to return to London because it really does not matter whether he leaves or not. His companions decide to stay for the same reason. So the Lind anti-hero trudges on--a pilgrim making no progress, a permanent refugee moving from one no man's land to another. Bring on the next clowns! Bring on the next cannibals!

Lind is nothing if not uneven. Weirdness follows weirdness, vision succeeds vision, sometimes worthy of a Hebrew prophet, sometimes no more than a gag-writer's whimsy. But Travels to the Enu adds up to far more than a tour de force. It takes true stamina to be so profoundly lost. After all these years on the road, Lind is no more bitter and no less funny than when he started, an impressive feat given the course of history in the meantime. His mind may swarm with hoofed and steaming demons like a phantasmagoric painting by Pieter Bruegel, but he can still grin at the bared fangs of his own beasts. He has not become a beast.

"A writer," he says, "is someone who hates himself and loves the world." In Jakov Lind's game, one out of two is not bad. --By Melvin Maddocks

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