Notable

THE TRUTH THAT KILLED by Georgi Markov Translated by Liliana Brisby Ticknor & Fields; 280 pages; $15.95

As he crossed London's Waterloo Bridge one September afternoon in 1978, a middle-aged foreigner was jostled by a man with an umbrella. The encounter looked as harmless as the weather; in fact, it was to recall the more lurid adventures of 007. For the foreigner was Bulgarian Georgi Markov, the stranger was a hired assassin, and the umbrella tip held a pellet loaded with ricin, a deadly poison. The notorious "umbrella murder" occurred because of the information contained in this chilling memoir, written after the author's defection in 1969.

Markov had been his country's leading novelist and playwright; he had also served a term during the Stalin years, in the Bulgarian Gulag. His prison experiences and literary skills combined to produce the scabrous picture of a nation enslaved. Yet in the eyes of the Bulgarian leadership that was not Markov's worst crime against the state. On Radio Free Europe the defector offered a description of Bulgarian President Todor Zhivkov, a smiling brute on the order of Nikita Khrushchev. At a banquet the author catches the official acting like a Balkan Queen of Hearts, shouting the Bulgarian equivalent of "Off with his head!" when a writer who has offended him is mentioned. Little wonder that when Markov ultimately aroused his ire, Zhivkov once again called for an execution by less Carrollian means. The Truth That Killed is Markov's valediction; it is also his revenge.

HEROES ARE GRAZING IN MY GARDEN by Heberto Padilla Translated by Andrew Hurley Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 250 pages $16.95

In 1971, Poet Heberto Padilla, who had remained in Cuba after most of his family had fled, was suddenly imprisoned, committed to solitary confinement and forced to confess to consorting with imperialists. Condemned to virtual house arrest, Padilla continued working as a translator until, through American intercession, he was allowed to seek exile in the U.S. in 1980. He smuggled out the only unconfiscated copy of this manuscript under a pile of letters in his carry-on bag.

Heroes presents the plaintiffs case for divorce owing to irreconcilable differences. Its narrative shadows the movements of two apparently autobiographical yet archetypal figures: Gregorio, a bloated writer captive to nostalgia, and Julio, a translator locked inside a squabbling relationship with an apparatchik named Luisa. In a society founded on unity, all three characters remain friendless and utterly disconnected; they see informers everywhere, and, they are sure, informers everywhere see them. All Havana, in fact, seems out of sorts and in a state of delirium tremens.

The only zealots in sight are willfully credulous European tourists. "You are a people truly young," burbles one foreign girl to the powerless and paralyzed Julio. "Everyone finds happiness in your country." Padilla knows better, and after a chapter or two of this biting phantasmagoria, so do all but the most naive readers.

The works of dissidents from socialist countries, the author concedes in an afterword, are far too often acclaimed in the West "out of solidarity rather than literary recognition." Heroes needs no such special treatment. Through his fugitive portraits of the artist as a young man no longer, Padilla hauntingly evokes a revolution in the throes of a wasting mid-life crisis.