Sicilian Ecstasies

AN END TO CHIVALRY by Tom Cole. 210 pages. Atlantic-Little, Brown. $4.95.

"Explosions. Vespas bursting into the left ear and out the right. Trucks with wheels of stone rumbling down the middle of the bed." Thus two Americans awake to the "normal havoc" of a Sicilian morning. Howard is a huge, blond, earnest young graduate student; Sarah, his wife, is a humorous, easygoing girl with honey-colored hair and long shapely legs. They have come to Agrigento to inspect the Grecian ruins and enjoy the local color; but they stay, as Author Tom Cole relates in the superb novella that dominates his first book of stories, because Sicily seizes them in its primordial field of force.

The primordial is personified in Polifemo, the gigantic demon who heaves up hairily out of millennial memory once every year and incites all Agrigento to resume the prehistoric and obscene religion of carnival. As carnival impends, an imminence like electricity waits in the air, an itching in the mind invites convulsion. Convulsion begins: a Bacchic ecstasy of vino nero, roaring scooters, rock 'n' roll. Howard, a tidy Nordic, draws back in distaste. Sarah, a subliminal Mediterranean, is drawn toward delirium. One morning, imagining her intentions innocent, she lets a young bull of a Sicilian kiss her.

"He was upon her with fierce power, pressing her back, clamping her with his shoulders and his knees, using his head like a bull. She screamed. He pulled back, astounded. His eyes were blinded flares like a racer's lights in the night. He hit her in the face. She fell apart." In the catastrophic conclusion of the tale, the world of sense and structure falls apart and leaves the scene to darkness and to Polifemo.

The chronicle of carnival is a commonplace of fashionable fiction, but this attempt is anything but commonplace. Author Cole, a 32-year-old lecturer in the humanities at M.I.T., has wit, charm, timing, a flair with atmosphere, a felicity of verbal gesture, a feeling for character so insidious it persuades the reader that every person of the drama is really just an unlived aspect of his own self. An End to Chivalry is a beginning of brilliance.

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