Amour Amok

Aurelien (680 pp.)--Louis Aragon, translated by Eithne Wilkins--Duell, Sloan & Pearce ($6).

From Aurelien, readers would not be likely to guess that handsome Author Louis Aragon is the intellectual showpiece of France's Communist Party. Written while Aragon kept one jump ahead of the Germans as a prolific pamphleteer of the Resistance, this novel steers clear of both Communism and World War II. Aurelien is the typical, almost standard, Gallic love story in which a wife knows how to stay out of the way when her husband's mistress turns up. Aragon seems as slickly at home in this tradition as he is in the job he took over last month: the editorship of the Paris Communist daily Ce Soir. Says Lover Aurelien's aged friend and adviser: "My boy, I've only one piece of advice to give you and it's advice you must take to heart. The women you sleep with don't matter--what's damnable is the women you don't sleep with."

And damnable it is to poor Aurelien. Two fat volumes after he falls for little, country-bred Berenice, this normally irresistible Paris playboy has hardly mussed her hair. Berenice is waiting for the perfect spiritual as well as physical love--though willing to take on a casual lover to help the time pass. To offset Aurelien's tedious lack of success with Berenice, Aragon keeps several other affairs going at a gamy clip in & out of bedrooms. No coincidence is too blatant, no cliche worn too smooth: ("How's Martha? I wasn't going to ask you. Ah, poor darling, marriage is one thing and love's another.").

There are moments when panels of the Paris of 1921 are briefly and brilliantly lighted up--fashionable house parties where the company is picked to create tensions, the conversation is acrid and infidelities are always in the making; arty gatherings and cafe parties which recall the days when Aragon was the darling of the Dadaists, days of his early prose poem: "The salmon sheen of silk stockings at the hour when cities are aflame. . . ." But readers who remember Aragon's ruthless, panoramic novels of prewar France (Residential Quarter, The Century Was Voting) will find none of the old satirical bite in Aurelien.

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