Child's Garden of Nightmares

THE GIANT DWARFS by Gisela Elsner. 309 pages. Grove Press. $5.95.

The hero of this novel is Leinlein, aged five, the only son of a middle-class couple in postwar Germany. Leinlein is not an ordinary child: he is clubfooted and a genius; he can plot cause and effect, motive and destiny; and in addition he is endowed with searing powers of social criticism. In short, he is one more incarnation of the fashionable new hero of the German novel: a grotesque, who is helpless, unaccountable to society, curiously cynical, yet devastatingly aware --all because of some deformity.

Novelist Guenter Grass set the style. Finding himself unable to dramatize the horrors of the Nazi era through the consciousness of a responsible man, Grass's imaginative and very successful solution was to see the years of horror through the sensibility of a dwarf. Following his lead, Jakov Lind, Uwe Johnson and Ingeborg Bachmann have made mutes, idiots and psychotics their means of confronting the bestiality of Nazi sadism on some sort of equal footing.

Gisela Elsner's novel is composed of ordinary events in Leinlein's life: breakfast with Mama and Papa, watching Papa at work, a day with Grandmama, a quarrel between his parents, a country outing with the family. But through

Leinlein's terrible and innocent eyes each episode is murderously dissected. Papa eats like a pig while Mama throws up into her napkin with revulsion. Grandmama is a steely old Nazi who relives the past by driving more nails into the crucifix above her bed. Since no one in the family will recognize Leinlein's lameness, every outing is a walk to Calvary at the end of which the child's feet are cut and bleeding; his elders' reaction is to abuse him for his weakness. Detail upon horrifying detail is piled with detachment and cold wit. There is no way out of this stifled society; "the giant dwarfs" live what become grotesquely normal day-to-day lives, circumscribed by grossness and materialism, adulterated by mistrust so consuming as to kill off any human emotion.

The author, a 28-year-old native of Frankfurt, has won the $10,000 Formentor Prize, given by a group of European and American publishers, for new fiction. The award is deserved. She lavishes too much space on grand paragraphs of involuted prose, and in so doing, she loses valuable dramatic time. But in her child's garden of nightmares are terrifying visions of a deformed and demented time.

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