Werther Transformed

ANTONIO IN LOVE by Giuseppe Berto. 302 pages. Knopf. $5.95.

Our young friend had in fact been accustomed for some time to the idea of the intercommunion or mutual compensation of sorrows and pleasures and experience had taught him that sorrows are not always even accompanied by pleasures so he was now surprised that he should experience some pleasures which temporarily at least came without their corresponding sorrows . . .

Fourteen lines follow this breathless passage before the sentence finally reaches a period. Even the reader who has earned his explorer's badge in trackless writing may have some initial trouble with such prose. Giuseppe Berto, whose writing career began in 1948 with an excellent war novel, The Sky Is Red, unveiled his new nonstop style in Incubus (TIME, Feb. 4, 1966), a remorseless account of a screenwriter's experience with psychoanalysis. Paradoxically, the method turns out to be better suited to a much more commonplace story, where radical style refreshes a traditional subject.

Antonio, a poor young man from a village near Venice, inherits a pittance and decides that it is time to fall in love. He picks Maria, a pretty, aloof-looking virgin. She turns out to be as eager to fall in love as he is, but she is far more direct and decisive. Antonio is troubled: How could the pure madonna of his fantasy tolerate his touching her? He is still trying to come to terms with this conundrum when Maria's rich parents callously separate the lovers. Antonio suffers extravagantly, even as he falls into the arms of the first promiscuous girl he meets.

The Leaps of Love. This novel is scarcely more than a rewrite of Goethe's romantic masterpiece, The Sorrows of Young Werther. It is one of the simplest love stories in the world, but Berto's sense of irony transforms it. He unerringly follows the foolish impulse to the ridiculous act, the self-deception to the empty boast, the self-doubt to the confident lie--all the leaps that young love tries and fails to make.

He also captures youth's ardent declarations with an intimacy that would be embarrassing in a conventional novel. It is precisely here that his rhythmic style--repetitive, insistent yet detached --triumphs. Instead of direct dialogue, he employs a wincingly accurate blend of external action with internal assessment, outer posture with private probing. By endlessly circling his characters with his ringed sentences, Berto arrives at the center of meaning that they themselves cannot reach.

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