No Pi in the Sky

THE TOWER OF BABEL (427 pp.)--Ellas Conetti, translated by C. V. Wedgwood--Alfred Knopf ($3.50).

This gruesome novel of human beastliness was one of the last (and most appropriate) to be published in Vienna before the Anschluss. Last year, it appeared in translation in England (where Bulgarian-born Author Canetti now lives) and set the critics ablaze pro & con. "Mere Central-European portentousness . . . at once heavy and trivial. . . . A terrific and inconsequent to-do about trifles,"harrumphed the dignified London Times Literary Supplement. "Appalling, magnificent," exclaimed the Spectator, "screams and bellows of evil out of which [a] supremely mad, unfaceable book is orchestrated . . . of which we dare not deny the genius."

Most American readers may well dare to deny The Tower of Babel's genius; few will deny its supreme madness or be deaf to its screams and bellows. Its principal character, Dr. Peter Kien, is the world's prime authority on Chinese, Japanese and Indian manuscripts. As a schoolboy prodigy, "in one minute Kien had memorized \prod to 65 decimal places." As a grown-up scholar, he lives in solitude, utterly shut off from the world by the tomes of his magnificent library, wholly dedicated to pedantry. One sad day, this sexless, infantile genius decides to marry his housekeeper, because she is the only person he can trust to dust his books.

From this point on, The Tower of Babel becomes a ghastly sequence of horrors-- or, as some may see it, a small-scale presentation of the fate of pure intellect in the clutches of today's harsh world. Slowly, inexorably, the new Mrs. Kien invades her hapless husband's ivory tower, teams up with the brutal janitor of the building to throw Kien out and sell his priceless library. Half-crazy, half-beaten to a pulp by his elephantine wife, Kien runs out into the streets--of which he is as ignorant as a babe--and takes shelter in a dive inhabited solely by petty racketeers and prostitutes. Within a few weeks he has been fleeced of his last penny, beaten up again and reduced to skin & bones. When at last Kien's brother, a famed psychiatrist, gets wind of the professor's plight and restores him to his old life, it is too late--Kien, incurably mad, burns himself and his library to the ground.

Author Canetti's strength and weakness spring from one source and obsession--his presentation of life as an inescapable concentration camp. For Canetti (who is just completing a 20-year study of the psychology of power), Europe's butcher, baker, & candlestickmaker are all instinctive Nazis, puffed up with egomania, bestiality, servility, and lust for power. They and their surroundings, as seen by Canetti, are worthy of a combination nightmare dreamed up by Edgar Allan Poe and Louis-Ferdinand Celine, illustrated by the 15th Century's master of the grotesque, Hieronymus Bosch, or the New Yorker's Charles Addams. Canetti's pages are an endless parade of unspeakables--degenerate peddlers, forgers, cops, salesmen, accompanied by trollops whose flinty hearts are touched only by masculine cruelty and deformity. "Women ought to be beaten to death," the caretaker tells poor Professor Kien. "My old woman now, she was black and blue to the end of her days. My poor daughter, God rest her. . . . I started on her when she was that high. . . . I'd got to keep me hand in, see? It's an art, that's what I say."

To make so unvarying a nightmare convincing requires more art than Author Canetti possesses. By the end of The Tower of Babel, readers are likely to be as much punch-drunk as genuinely impressed. The Tower of Babel is a novel that only Central Europe in its death throes could have produced, and its vitality rests less on skill and imagination than on impassioned desperation and loathing.

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