The Survivor

THE LOST SHORE by Anna Langfus. 254 pages. Pantheon. $4.95.

Novelists are often the worst judges of their own intentions, and Polish-born Anna Langfus is no exception. In The Lost Shore, she explains, she was aiming at a bestseller in the manner of Franc,oise Sagan. What she achieved was a novel simple and laconic in manner but as anguished as a muffled scream. It won the Prix Goncourt.

In its plot, The Lost Shore is classically Saganesque: a young woman meets an elderly man in Paris, listlessly encourages his shy advances, and goes off to live with him on the Riviera.

But Novelist Langfus' Maria is not one of Sagan's self-indulgent heroines. A survivor of three years in a German concentration camp in which she lost her husband and parents, she has a derelict's vision of the world as a place where love is impossible and the human condition hopeless. The secret of survival in such a world, she has learned, is to smother every flicker of feeling. The old man appeals to her at first because he seems to offer her comfort in exchange for a minimum emotional payment on her part.

For a time, in the "giant hothouse" of the Mediterranean coast, Maria's feelings seem about to thaw. Contempt for the old man gives way to a reluctant compassion; a friendship with four vacationing children restores for a while the "miraculous gift of liveliness." But feeling exacts a price: "Suffering, which had been impatiently biding its time, hurled itself upon me." As memories come flooding back, Maria at first tries to reject them and then flees.

It is not always easy for a reader to feel sorry for a character who is so persistently sorry for herself. But Author Langfus' heroine in The Lost Shore has survived the concentration camp only to become a piece of human driftwood, driven by memories of a horror that, for a whole shattered generation, stubbornly refuse to die.

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