Pain, Joy & Wonder

ACROSS PARIS AND OTHER STORIES (254 pp.) -Marcel Ayme -Harper ($3.50).

To France's Marcel Ayme, 56, literary art is the science of the impossible. Characters in Across Paris, a collection of twelve remarkable short stories, walk through walls, don seven-league boots, and play chess with stuffed owls. If the meanings are not always crisp and clear, the prose is. In his stories as in his novels (The Barkeep of Blemont, The Second Face) Author Ayme follows one rule: put all of life's ironies in the creative fire.

In The Walker-Through-Watts a meek, middle-aged government clerk named Dutilleul fumbles for the light switch in his apartment one evening and finds himself in the vestibule outside. Hypnotically, he walks right back through the wall into his flat. He soon puts his strange talent to use in bank vaults and jewelry shops, signs himself "The Werewolf." When the Werewolf is captured by the police, he simply evaporates through the thick prison walls. But Dutilleul's powers desert him one night in mid-wall at his mistress' home, and passing Parisians take his walled-up cries for the whining of the wind.

In The State of Grace M. Duperrier, a good Christian in the prime of life, is crowned with a radiant halo "which looked as though it might have been cut out of fairly stiff cardboard." His wife is socially embarrassed, for "she thought it more important to be esteemed by her concierge than by her Creator." A dutiful husband, Duperrier cultivates the seven deadly sins in the hope of losing the halo. Matters reach a hilariously poignant pitch when Duperrier blushingly prepares for lust by reading the latest sex manuals aloud. At story's end, he is a prostitute's pimp, but the nimbus of light still rings his head. The highly orthodox moral: the unmerited gift of divine grace is not man's to will or wile away.

Other stories range from the fantastic to the philosophical. Martin the Novelist is a Pirandelphic yarn in which characters search out the author and argue their rights and reality. The Wine of Paris presents a mad alcoholic, a most happy fella who thinks that other people are bottles of wine. With its cork-popping wit and full-bodied bouquet of pain, joy and wonder, Across Paris is vintage Ayme from a small but peerless literary vineyard.

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