Pendulum Left

By John Skow

A MANUAL FOR MANUEL

by Julio Cortazar

Pantheon; 389 pages; $10.95

Argentina is a country rich in every thing but stability. The nation has been so cursed by bloody political convulsions that its own best people have pro nounced their homeland incurable. Julio Cortazar's novel, A Manual for Manuel, is one Argentine expatriate's eccentric response to violence in his country (and to some extent Uruguay and Brazil) in the early 1970s. Cortzar, who has lived in Paris for some decades, writes in a surreal fashion. The effects can be dazzling -- as in All Fires the Fire and Other Stories of several years ago. Here, in a disjointed narrative, he gives a low-key, comic and rather appealing picture of "the Screwery," a band of romantic South American revolutionaries based in France. As the book commences, they are subverting the Establishment by filling new cigarette packages with burnt-out butts, and smuggling cartons of the fakes into bars and tobacco shops to be sold as the real thing. They progress to grimmer matters, among them the kidnaping of a South American police official.

As Cortazar wrote, he clipped news paper articles about political torture and other governmental outrages. He has his characters read these from day to day and paste them into a scrapbook for little Manuel, the baby son of two cell mem bers. The dispatches are photocopied in the novel so that the fictional Manuel, and all of the real Manuels who may be involved in the struggle some day, will know what their elders were fighting against. But there is no real attempt to examine the causes of right-wing terror or the pendulum swing left to counterterror.

Cortazar finished his book in 1972, when the oppressive and ineffective General Alejandro Lanusse was President. A note to the American reader says that conditions under the present military government of General Jorge Videla are just as bad. This may be true, but it seems somewhat disingenuous not to have men tioned that between Lanusse and Videla was another leader of some notoriety. His name was Juan Perdn, and his two reigns covered some ten years (1946-55, 1973-74). His second coming lasted just one year. Then he died, leaving the country to his wife Isabelita, and to chaos. During the last Peronista years, terror spread by the guerrilla left was a similar but bloodier version of that practiced by the Screwery. It paralyzed the country with out materially advancing the revolution aries' aims -- and brought on the current repression. There have been some signs that the Videla regime would like to govern in a more moderate fashion, when extremists let them. And the pendulum swings on. -- John Show

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