Remembrance of Loves Past

THE FILM OF MEMORY (171 pp.)--Maurice Druon--Scrlbner's ($3).

The timid new hotel chambermaid is warned to expect trouble from the countess, for Lucrezia Sanziani is dotty, penniless and old--a kind of walking Roman ruin. Fresh from Rome's Trastevere slums, Carmela, the young chambermaid, is prepared to quake at the countess' least whim. Instead, she finds herself cast as a confidante of yesteryear in the old lady's wandering mind. Each day, in the afterglow of the Roman twilight, the countess stares deeply into her Florentine silver-gilt hand mirror and conjures up a hallucinated remembrance of loves past.

Latin Brio. The neo-pagan life of love and love of life revealed to Carmela in these reveries make The Film of Memory a sensuous shelfmate to David Garnett's recently published Aspects of Love (TIME, Jan. 30). French Novelist Maurice Druon, a Prix Goncourt winner, applies Latin brio and an urbane Gallic prose style to his tale, and he can navigate the rapids of a zany stream of consciousness without drowning the reader.

To the theatrical has-beens and wouldbes of Rome's fleabag Hotel Imperatore, the Countess Sanziani exudes the imposing aura of a famed once-was. For La Sanziani. as Carmela soon learns, was once a legendary courtesan, mistress of a d'Annunzio-like poet, playmate of a Dutch multimillionaire, brief bedfellow of the Kaiser and of many another great or near great. Carmela is too young to sense it, but the poignancy of the countess is that in her rage to relive these past love affairs, she is dueling with her last and most pressing suitor--death.

As in most duels, the serious blends insensibly with the comic. The countess makes bequests of gems she has pawned, mistakes total strangers for lifetime friends. But in her infrequent lucid moments, the countess teaches young Carmela that the full life requires the taste of a connoisseur and the instincts of a gambler. "Never economize with life," she warns. "It never gives anything back." Carmela suddenly acquires the confidence of her own sexual power and beauty. It shines through to a film director (clearly modeled on Vittorio De Sica) who screen-tests the young beauty at just about the time that the old countess looks up from her deathbed to ask, rather like a child at party's end:"What? Is life over already?" Via Veneto Glitter. Amid the eerie indirections of the countess' mind, Novelist Druon subtly contrasts the past glories of Rome with the Via Veneto glitter of the present day. The countess celebrates the life of blazing passion and pleasure on a neo-Renaissance scale, but Author Druon is too steady-eyed to blink what Cyril Connolly has called "the remorse which is the shadow of that sun." Oddly enough, it is the countess' way of dying rather than living that is memorable. Pacing half-crazed on the burning deck of her memories, she becomes a strangely gallant figure calling to mind two lines of Dylan Thomas on how to receive death:

Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

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