In the Continental Manner

FRENCH STORIES AND TALES (326 pp.)--Edited by Stanley Gelst--Knopf ($3.95).

MODERN ITALIAN SHORT STORIES (429 pp.)--Edited by Marc Slonim--Simon & Schuster ($5).

The stories in these two collections form a literary skyline ranging from grand ruins to temporary housing. After weathering the years in all critical climates, the French tales, engineered by such masters as Stendhal, Flaubert, de Maupassant, are pitted in spots, but glow with the patina of timelessness. The Italian stories, put up in the hurry and scurry of the post-World War I decades by such contemporary literary architects as Alberto Moravia, Carlo Levi and Vasco Pratolini, rock with life, and occasionally with shaky craftsmanship. American readers, surfeited with New Yorker-like tales of muted discontent, may find both collections refreshing reminders of what Italy's Ignazio Silone calls "the really important events of life--birth, love, suffering, death."

French Stories and Tales, ably edited by Stanley Geist, a young American critic and writer living in Paris, offers the richer literary experience. The selections range from a Stendhal love story, as intricate as a Japanese tea ceremony, to a fragment of Swiftian satire by Baudelaire on the suicide of a Parisian street urchin. In between, Balzac, Zola and Guy de Maupas sant lash at the favorite whipping boy of French letters, the French middle class. Best yarns in the book are stories of simple nobodies by Gustave Flaubert and Joris-Karl Huysmans.

The Big Green Parrot. In A Simple Heart, Flaubert takes a plain-as-rain spinster housemaid and erodes her placid life with tragedies. From dawn to dusk, Felicite slaves for the Aubain family, all of whom take her toil for granted. She loves her young nephew like a son, but he dies at sea. Desolate, she clings to the delicate Aubain daughter only to see the girl die of TB. Felicite swaddles her grief in piety and finds a pet in a green parrot. After a few years the parrot dies too, and Felicite has it stuffed. Time robs the old lady of her hearing, dims her eyesight and addles her mind, so that sometimes she kneels in prayer before a color picture of Christ, sometimes before the stuffed parrot. As she lies in bed, half-crazed, alone, and dying, Felicite's last earthly vision is of a huge parrot hovering over her head. Flaubert keeps cool about all this, but his evocative prose keens a universal dirge for the lonely, desolate humans in the world.

Modern Minotaur. In Monsieur Folantin, Huysmans does much the same kind of thing for a cantankerous old bachelor with stomach trouble whose only quest in life is a good place to eat. Huysmans adds the pepper of cosmic malice and by the time he finishes tightening the belt of loneliness and despair around M. Folantin's spiritual midriff, ashes seem the principal diet of mankind.

By contrast, the sunniest tale in the book is by that late great skeptic, Andre Gide, who tells his version of how Theseus bested the Minotaur. The thesis of Gide's Theseus is that the cave of the Minotaur is seductive as well as labyrinthine, a lotus land of indolence and confusion which exists in every man's mind more surely than it ever did in ancient Crete, and that each man must sally forth from it after slaying his personal monsters of fear and convention. In his serene, neoclassic way. Gide puts a French accent on the pithy Greek maxim, "Know Thyself."

Metaphysical Pingpong. Modern Italian Short Stories, compiled by Marc Slonim, is saturated with what Critic Cyril Connolly once called "the memory of physical pleasure, with sunshine and salt water, with food, wine and making love, and with the remorse which is the shadow of that sun." Serving up life as if it were a huge platter of prosciutto and melon, the Italian authors offer highly palatable reading on such subjects as the folly of an old fool in love (Pratolini's A Mistress of Twenty, Italo Svevo's This Indolence of Mine), the dark rapture of revenge (Cesare Pavese's The Leather Jacket), and the metaphysical pingpong of illusion v. reality (Luigi Pirandello's The Bat).

The finest story in the book is Moravia's The Unfortunate Lover, about a catty mistress who plays a cruel game of Iloveyou, I-love-you-not with her mouselike lover. The best war story is Indro Montanelli's O. Henry-like His Excellency. A monocled, tight-corseted army corps commander named Delia Rovere is clapped into a Milan prison by the Germans in the spring of 1944. He lets his junior fellow officers know that Italy expects them to face the firing squad with courage: "An officer is at all times merely on temporary duty; he is, as the Spaniards say . . . a bridegroom of death." Inspired by Delia Rovere, the prisoners face death bravely to hear his clipped "Jolly good show, sir." Only after death comes to Della Rovere is he unmasked as a thieving small-time card sharp, who cheated on everything but his country's honor.

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