Hispanic Odysseus

By Paul Gray

JOURNEY OF THE WOLF

by DOUGLAS DAY 245 pages. Atheneum. $8.95.

After a 34-year exile in France, Sebastian Resales illegally re-enters the Spain of 1973. A veteran of the losing side in the Spanish Civil War, Resales must dodge Franco's police if he hopes to reach his native village to the south, in Andalusia. He has little money and no nostalgia for the scenes of past battles. All Resales possesses is macho dignity and the bitter sense that "he had been robbed of 37 years of his life--his life in the Alpujarras--by some stupid idea, some cause. What a stupidity."

In his first novel, Douglas Day, author of a 1974 prizewinning biography of Malcolm Lowry, rings his hero through a number of old narrative changes. Resales is the Hispanic Odys seus on his arduous journey homeward.

The grizzled teller of grisly war tales is also a time traveler who discovers a new world he cannot comprehend. Lest even the dimmest reader miss Rosales' mythic overtones. Day gives him the nickname El Lobo and introduces a scene in which the hero stares pensively at a caged but still spunky wolf.

Massive Betrayals. All this allusiveness nearly swamps Rosales' story. Moreover, Day often falls into a "Hey, meester" rendering of how Spanish might be written if it were English; the result sounds like Ricardo Montalban reading aloud from the works of Ernest Hemingway. By inserting (for flavor) so many Spanish words and (for sense) their English translations, Day sets up a rhythm with all the verve of a language primer. Characters talk as if they were constantly flipping back to the glossary to check their meanings.

Yet Journey of the Wolf manages to outlast the errors and inexperience of its author. Although his touch is unsure, Day keeps El Lobo and the story moving at a good clip, through a Spanish landscape drawn with evident familiarity and style. Most important, memories of the war still lend a fascination that the best fiction cannot wholly capture and the worst cannot extinguish. This passionate and brutal struggle was the postage stamp on a letter to the world.

It engaged all the major ideologies of the West and spurred much romance, along with massive betrayals and duplicities. Day knows that the conflict was a major force in history; he is intelligent enough to make it the major character of his book .

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